Dara’s Picks: Best New Foods at the 2023 Minnesota State Fair

Here are the top new foods to eat at the Minnesota State Fair this year, according to our food critic.

by

“It’s a mini donut, Charlie, a mini donut!” I paused as I was racing from one new food to the other, and watched six adults clustered around a baby, maybe a year-and-a-half old, sitting in a folding umbrella stroller. Most of the adults had their phones out for photos, and the kid was looking past the donut with some worry: Why were all the adults around him freaking out about his reaction to an inch of dough? 

It struck me as the purest distillation of State Fair moments. 

Why go to the reunion? To the family reunion, to the class reunion? We all know the answer: To see everyone, to get that internal marker of how you have changed, how they have changed, to refresh your connection to people and places you care about. That’s what the Minnesota State Fair is. I never, ever get over the bald fact of a state of 5.7 million people where around 2 million of us show up for the Fair. One out of three of us? 

Yes, yes, I know that some of you go every day so that skews the numbers, but seriously. Of all the ways Minnesota is wonderful, the State Fair never ceases to strike me as meaningful and touching. Our annual reunion! Where we eat too much and take pictures of the same wonderful kids changing meaningfully in front of the same-but-different sculptures of butter queens. 

The first time I wrote about some, but not all, of the new foods, in 1997, it was sort of as a concierge, to tell people what was worth their hard earned money, and what wasn’t. Since then, all of us ranking and tasting the new foods, as a hobby, as a spectator sport, it’s taken on a life of its own. 

We’ve debated internally at the magazine: Is it our Super Bowl, our own private Oscars, something that can never leave for a bigger market—is that why we love it? Obviously, all the world has donuts, but why are mini donuts at the Fair different? Why do we need all our little Charlies to know that these are different, that you’re in a different world, you belong to a different club, when you get a State Fair mini donut?  

I think it’s that reunion thing, the check-in, the check-in about ourselves, and everyone else, too. It’s important. 

Racing around and trying all the foods I could, a few things leapt out at me in 2023. One: the restaurant professionalization of the Fair, the foodie-ness of the Fair, it’s real, it’s big, it’s permanent now. You could experience nothing but restaurant chefs at the Fair now—see Gerard Klass at Soul Bowl, James Beard nominee Yia Vang at Union Hmong Kitchen, Scott Graden at New Scenic Café, and Kris Koch at Farmer’s Union if you want to work this thesis through.  

Two, the segmentation for dietary preferences is complete—there are now regular and jumbo vegan corn dogs, vegan superstar the Herbivorous Butcher, and a great, great number of other vegan treats, from Holy Land Deli, Baba’s, Churros and Agua Frescas, Quench’d, and Que Viet, to name a few. Finally, the era of completeness, at least for me, is over. With sixty-plus beers, and a hundred-plus foods (thirty-eight official new foods and more than a hundred “bonus” new foods, either “secret” new foods from established vendors or the whole menu of new vendors) it is no longer reasonable to try to get to every single everything in a day. Personally, I made it through about fifty of the new foods, the ones I judged most likely to make it to a top five, and out of those I had a truly impossible time picking a top five, this was the year that I could have easily done a top ten. Now, I know that’s a lot of pre-amble. Probably a lot of you just skim to the answers and never read any of the wordy words, but for those of you that do: What I want you to know about this 2023 top five is: This is us. This is you and your world, it’s a snapshot of culture, it’s different than it was in 1997 or 1980 and it will be different in 2040. Go on out there, push your babies in umbrella strollers, walk shoulder to shoulder with your gangly teens, do the thing we Minnesotans do: Hold up a food to share at the Fair and say: This is us, this is important, though it doesn’t look it, this is what we do, once a year, to remember who we are, and who we are in the crowd.

5. Quench’d Lemon Sorbet

Just fresh lemons, sugar, water, frozen into sorbet, served in a half of a lemon—what a lovely, fresh, lively, charming, simple idea! That hardest thing is to be simple. I loved this little thing. A little lemon zest tumbles in, because that’s what happens when you’re dealing with fresh lemons, and that makes a bite now and then a little zingier than the others, and it’s perfect on a hot day. Also, I read Lady in Waiting, a memoir by Anne Glenconner, a pleasantly crazy and tragic member of the extended royal family, and in it she mentioned that this was Princess Margaret’s favorite dessert, and now we can all live like royals! For five bucks. I appreciate the rare budget-friendly dessert, too. I loved it. So simple. Is the hardest thing to be simple? Yes. 

4. RC’s BBQ, Maui-Sota Sticky Pork Ribs

I loved this year’s new barbecue pork ribs at RC's. Charred and flavorful in just the right ways, fatty in just the right ways, lush, rich, perked up by scallion and garlic but not in any way sweet. Charlie Torgerson, an original Famous Dave’s pit master who went out on his own, has been running RCs as the Minnesota State Fair’s leading barbecue spot and perennial number six or seven in my top fives for a few years. My main complaint is always that his barbecue tends towards the sweet. But not this year, when sticky is right in the name. Go figure. I also appreciate that Torgerson is donating part of the proceeds to fire recovery in Maui. Eat well, feel good about it?   

3. Farmer’s Union, Fried Green Tomato Sandwiches

Farmer’s Union is absolutely killing it this year. Chef Kris Koch spent the winter figuring out a very Minnesotan fried green tomato, using a chunky coarse cornmeal, almost like a polenta, to coat local green tomatoes. The sour green tomato juice seeps out and into the cornmeal, making something like a thick polenta crust that, when fried, creates a fried green tomato slice unlike any I’ve ever had. It’s hard, but easy to bite, and just absolutely packed with flavor; sour, savory, rich, intense. For his vegetarian sandwich, he tops it with a chunky corn relish that’s absolutely packed with flavor from red onions, mustard, and herbs. By the time he combines it with lettuce on a soft white bun from the Good Bread Co., I just had my breath taken away. Is it the best vegetarian sandwich I ever had? Is it something new under the sun? There’s also a bacon version without the corn relish, I loved that too. Both are $15, and I’d argue, well worth it. But that’s not all that the farmers are doing spectacularly. Farmer’s Union is getting desserts this year from Patisserie 46, our wonderful south Minneapolis bakery by world-famous pastry chef John Krauss. Krauss has taken his buttery, orangey madeleine batter, poured it over berries from local Blue Fruit Farm in Winona, and the whole thing comes together to be both summer simple and spectacular. 

2. Union Hmong Kitchen, Galabao 

Yia Vang, Minnesota’s leading Hmong chef, told me that his decision to serve bao at the State Fair this year started when his brother went to college in New York, and missed mom’s food. So mom started packing boxes of fifty, and air-freighted them to the city. The lucky son would microwave one in the morning, head out, feeling loved and well fed. Well, this year Yia Vang got his actual mom and another eight elder Hmong women to make more than 18,000 bao, for us. Vang guesses if they were set end to end, they’d stretch a mile. Do you want to know what it tastes like, the mile-long love of a Hmong mom for her distant child? Get on line, grab one for $12, dip a chunk of steamed dough holding a bit of pork, cabbage, and scallion filling into the spicy green herb sauce and just think about how unusual it is in this world that you get to taste a mom’s love, a mom that’s not yours! What a rare gift, what a rare experience, how lucky we are.  

1. Spinning Wylde, Cloud Coolers

Cloud Coolers. What’s so special about a cloud of cotton candy on top of a lemonade? Everything. Spinning Wylde’s owner Tevy Phann just has an amazing ability to combine whimsy, eventfulness, theatricality, and flavor in one stunning bouquet. I tried the different flavors of lemonade, the tart Happy Huckleberry (with blackberry cotton candy), the subtle violet lemonade with lavender cotton candy, and the very strawberry-intense strawberry lemonade with strawberry cotton candy. They’re all great, but not so different that I think it’s worth making a fuss about the different flavors. What is worth making a fuss about is the sheer specialness, the joy, getting one feels like being presented with a tiara and a big bouquet of roses. For me? For me! Find someone you love, splash out the twelve bucks for the whole thing, watch their face light up, take a picture. If the State Fair is above all a place you go with people you love to spend time with them, how terrific it is that Spinning Wylde has created a bouquet you can hand them to tell them so.