The Orange County Fair is on in Costa Mesa, and while there are rides and livestock and a demolition derby, the honest reason most people go is to eat things they would never make at home. This year's crop is a good one.
The picks below draw on LAist's tour of the fair's food, plus what these items actually are for the uninitiated.
The croffle
Mom's Bakeshoppe is selling a croffle, which is a croissant pressed in a waffle iron, then loaded up: ice cream, chocolate chips, whipped cream, caramel.
The appeal is textural. A croissant has layers; a waffle has a crisp grid that holds toppings in its pockets. Press one into the other and you get the flaky interior of the croissant with the crackly, sauce-trapping exterior of the waffle. Cold ice cream against warm pastry is the finishing trick. It is a lot. That is the point of fair food.
The French onion bun
Ten Pound Buns has a French onion bun, which takes the best part of French onion soup, the caramelized onions and the raft of melted, browned cheese, and puts it on crisp bread without the bowl of broth.
This is the smartest item on the list, because it isolates what people actually love about the soup. Nobody's favorite part of French onion soup is the soup. It is the cheese and the onions and the toast, and this is those three things without the spoon.
The one that sounds wrong
The Philly Cheesesteak stand is doing a peanut butter and jelly bacon cheeseburger: bacon, cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickles, jelly and peanut butter on a burger.
Read on paper it sounds like a dare. In practice the logic is sound. Peanut butter is fat and salt; jelly is sweet and acidic; bacon is smoke and salt; the burger is savory and rich. Sweet-and-savory with a fatty base is the same idea as a peanut sauce or a mole, just assembled by someone at a county fair. LAist found it genuinely worked rather than merely shocked, which is the higher bar.
The practical part
The fair is at the OC fairgrounds in Costa Mesa and runs through the summer. Because dates, hours, admission and parking change and the Herald was not able to confirm current prices for this account, check the fair's official website before you go rather than trusting a number in a news story.
A few things that do not change. Go on a weekday afternoon or early evening if you can, when the lines are shortest. Wear shoes you can stand in for hours. Drink more water than you think you need, because it is July in Orange County and you are about to eat a peanut-butter cheeseburger. And pace yourself: the failure mode at a fair is spending your whole appetite on the first thing you see. Walk the loop once before you commit.
The food is the event. Everything else is the excuse.
