Deep Fried Ice Cream Receipe

Fair Food: Step up, get fried Kool-Aid right here!

Heading to one of Western Pennsylvania's many county fairs or local farm shows? The tilt-a-whirl ain't the only thing that's going to test whether or not you have an iron stomach.

As videographer Steve Mellon and I learned when we hit the road for the latest episode of "Cooking With Gretchen," the food, too, might throw you for a loop.

As you can see in our video below, gone are the days when fairgoers chased away the munchies with a classic corn dog or feathery plume of cotton candy. If this year's Butler Farm Show is any indication -- and we're betting the farm it is -- it's not "fair food" until it's been battered and deep fried. And we're not just talking crowd favorites such as onion rings and funnel cakes.

Snacks as disparate as Reese's peanut butter cups, Oreos, pierogies and dill pickle spears are getting the same artery-clogging treatment at fairs all across the country. During our stroll up and down Food Alley, we discovered even the humble peanut butter and jelly sandwich now is a recipe for fried food success.

"You only live once," says Howard Mounts of New Middleton, Ohio, who dips the crustless sandwiches in funnel cake batter before dropping them into the hot oil. Weird, but also not bad if you like your dessert hot and gooey. Generously dusted with cinnamon and confectioners' sugar, it tasted like a doughnut.

What we really wanted to wrap our taste buds around was the deep-fried Kool-Aid.

Ever since carnival chef "Chicken Charlie" Boghosian trotted out these cherry-flavored, doughnut hole-like treats at the San Diego County Fair earlier this summer, they've been all the rage, probably because people just can't imagine how you take something liquid like Kool-Aid and turn it into a treat you can pop in your mouth. Answer: you make a batter with the drink powder, and use an ice cream scoop to drop balls of it into a deep fryer.

Chicken Charlie is something of a maverick when it comes to carnival food, having also invented the deep-fried Oreo, the Krispie Kreme chicken sandwich and the Zucchini Weeni, a batter-dipped zucchini stuffed with a hot dog. Yet he's not the only one thinking outside the food booth box. At last year's State Fair of Texas, concessionaires competing in the fair's Big Tex Choice Awards for top new foods wowed the hungry crowds with a fried club salad, the deep-fried frozen margarita and fried beer (it's inside a pretzel). In 2009, fairgoers got their first tastes of deep-fried butter. As in a whole 800-plus-calorie stick of it, stuffed inside a dough ball and flavored with grape, garlic or cherry.

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