San Diego Fair Part 2

So I paid another visit to the fair before it left San Diego. Part 1 can be found here. My first trip to the fair every year seems to be a mad frenzy to try all the new fair foods. My second trip is usually to cover the foods we didn’t get to sample and to visit some of the other exhibits at the fair.

We went on July 4th, which was the first time we had done so. I was worried it would be really crowded, but it wasn’t too bad. I think it was more crowded on our first visit a few weeks back.

We started out with the food of course.

First was the tater dog twister. I loved how this item looked when I discovered it last year, and so I got it again. A thin sausage dog is on a stick and wrapped in a spiral of deep fried potatoes. It basically tastes like a sausage with potato chips. I thought the seasoning was a bit too thick, making this too salty. It’s fun to look at, but it’s not my favorite fair food.

We got some cow pie. I remembered really enjoying the cow pie a few years back but couldn’t remember what it looked or tasted like. It’s basically your ordinary ice cream sundae, set inside a waffle bowl dipped in chocolate. In this case it was more like a waffle plate…which made the waffle portion hard to eat. It tasted fine, but it was nothing special, and so I was somewhat disappointed.

Next we had the Mexican fried ice cream, a treat we had enjoyed a lot last year. The ice cream is not actually fried, but it’s made to look like it was. Crunchy cereal glazes the ice cream (it tasted like honey bunches of oats), and then there are some cinnamon flavored tortilla chips as well. The ice cream itself has some cinnamon flavoring. The ice cream is pretty tasty with the chips and you do kind of feel like you are eating fried ice cream, without having to worry about your ice cream being a melted mess (I’m looking at you deep fried klondike bar).

After two rounds of ice cream, we were ready for some salty again. This brought us to Juicy’s. I love Juicy’s giant western sausage. It’s one of the few fair items that I must get every year. Before discovering Juicy’s, I tried quite a few of the sausage sandwich offerings from other vendors, but they don’t compare in my opinion. The giant western sausage is about a foot long. It’s placed in a thick roll, and topped with sauteed onions and peppers. The combination is delicious. It’s also definitely meant to be shared.

While eating, we watched people doing the death drop.

After eating our sausage sandwich, we opted to try the churro funnel cake. Long Churro strands are wrapped in circles to resemble a funnel cake. You can also top it with whipped cream and strawberries to give a true funnel cake look. I first saw the debut of the churro funnel cake last year. They have this enormous one, where if you can finish in an hour, it’s free. I tried to get a shot of it. It’s ridiculously big. I saw one person try and fail. Then I saw another person right after he had finished it, so I didn’t actually see him eat it. I was still really impressed though.

Three of us shared a regular sized one, and failed to finish even that one.

It was good, but way too sweet. The contest one is about three times as big. I really can’t imagine being able to finish that.

Next up we had the hash dog and also got the sweet potato dog again. I didn’t enjoy the sweet potato dog as much as I did the first time. I liked the hash dog, but I wish it used the spicy sausage that is in the sweet potato dog instead of the plain hot dog. I did like the taste of the crispy and soft potato batter though.

One of the prizes I kept seeing people carry was this giant banana:

We had contemplated getting the Australian battered potatoes, but we were out of room by this point. BF suggested we could bring it home, but I didn’t think they would taste good anymore.

We also enjoyed looking at the giant blooming onion and the giant onions used to make it:

Done with eating, we went to check out the flowers and the animals.

At the end, we had to swing by Tony’s for their giant turkey legs. A few years ago, we learned that you can get the giant turkey leg to go. They’ll wrap it up in plates and foil for you. Since we’ve never been able to finish the turkey leg at the fair, we started getting it to go when we are about to leave. Since it’s not fried, it still tastes good later on. Tony’s is my favorite place for turkey legs. I’ve tried a bunch of the other bbq spots, which offer turkey legs at about $1 less than Tony’s, but they always disappoint me. The turkey leg is definitely the specialty here. You can tell my the huge crew that man over the turkey legs, constantly rotating them, sticking thermometers in them, etc.

Our second trip to the fair was definitely more calm and leisurely. We had fun and I enjoyed taking Baby Bro to his first fair and watching him eat his first smoked turkey leg. See you next year SD fair!