Fair Food: From Spiral Fries to Corn Dogs

DEL MAR —  Walk right in, it’s around the back

Just a half a mile from the railroad track;

You can get anything you want

At Alice’s restaurant.

--”Alice’s Restaurant”

by Arlo Guthrie

Like Alice’s restaurant, the midway at the Del Mar Fair is about half a mile from the railroad tracks.

And, as at Alice’s, you can get just about anything you want--anything to eat.

But even Alice might wonder about the wisdom of selling all this stuff at once: chocolate pancakes and corn dogs, strawberry shortcake and pepperoni pizza.

Virtually anything that once flew, swam, grew on a plant or spent the night in a barn can be bought and eaten this year at the fair. Chances are it will be served up fried, grilled or mounted on a stick.

Not everyone realizes that food is one of the fair’s main attractions. Many people assume it’s something fairgoers think about only when they’re whizzing around on some mechanical ride and start to recall what they recently ate.

Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Robert Jackson. “People don’t realize it, but a lot of them come here to eat. That’s the God’s-honest truth,” he said.

“This is the biggest fair in California for food. It doesn’t get too hot--the weather conditions are right for eating all day long.”

Jackson, 39, is one of the many food vendors at the fair this year. Like most of the vendors he spends all summer on the road, towing his trailers-cum-food stands to county fairs throughout the state.

His specialty is corn--char-broiled corn. The ears of corn, still in the husk, are soaked in salt water, then heated over a gas-fired grill with volcanic rocks in it. After about 15 minutes the husk is slightly charred and the corn is ready to eat.

“It has more flavor and color than boiled corn,” explained Jackson. “It’s crisper, too. But you’ve got to start with fresh corn, not frozen. If it’s not fresh, you lose the whole idea of the whole concept.

“We serve it with real butter, and also with hot sauce. It’s not unusual for someone--even women--to eat more than one. One time I saw a big guy eat five.”

Jackson, who lives on the shore of Lake Shasta in Northern California, is staying with friends in Solana Beach. This is only the second year he has taken part in the Del Mar Fair, but he is a veteran with 17 years’ experience serving food at fairs.

“I used to do barbecue. I was the guy who stood in the window and carved the beef,” he said. “But beef costs got so high, driving up the overhead. . . . I decided to switch over to corn.

“There was an original char-broiled corn guy on the fair circuit before me, but he cooked it with briquets. I got the idea from him, but with this grill there’s less smoke. Now I’m the only one who serves corn this way.

“See, all of us (vendors) have a special item. What you need is a product common enough that people will try it, but different enough so they haven’t had it that way.”

Case in point: giant, one-pound baked potatoes, which Jackson also sells. “You cannot buy those potatoes in the store,” he insisted. “You fix one up with chili or cheese and it’s a meal .”

Or spiral fries, sold a short distance down the midway from Jackson’s char-broiled corn stand. Eighteen-year-old Ken Kasinak explained that the fries are made from fresh potatoes skewered on a screw-like apparatus with a crank handle. As the crank is turned the potato is automatically carved into a thin spiral and then fried in hot oil.

“My Dad owns the place; I’m just the manager,” Kasinak said during a free moment inside his small, sweltering trailer. “We live in Clairemont. My Dad’s been selling food at fairs for seven or eight years, but this is only his second year with spiral fries. He started out with silver-dollar-sized doughnuts.”

Two whole potatoes go into every order of spiral fries, forming a kind of nest of fried potatoes roughly six inches high and eight inches across. On a day when sales are brisk, Kasinak and his helpers go through 800 pounds of potatoes and enough cooking grease to float an oil tanker.

“Spiral fries aren’t very well known out here, but back East they’re as common as corn dogs,” he noted. “It’s kind of the same with silver-dollar-sized doughnuts. Hardly anybody in California knows about them, but in Minnesota they’re all over the place.”

One of the few completely new food stands at the fair this year is Alex Vauclair’s Western Bar-B-Q. For some reason, fair officials have given him a spot far from the other food stands, near the barns that house swine and other livestock.

“The animals run out of the barns and jump right into my barbecuer,” he joked.

In reality, Vauclair, a big, stocky man from Mesa, Ariz., doesn’t find much humor in the location. However, he conceded that he needs a relatively large space for his barbecue oven, an enormous black cylinder that resembles an antique train engine.

Vauclair said his uncle built the oven using part of an old industrial smokestack and various other parts scrounged from junkyards. Through a hatch in the side, Vauclair puts in whole turkeys, pork and beef roasts, and then stokes the fire below the meat rack with mesquite logs.

“I brought 3 1/2 cords of mesquite with me, and I can cook 550 pounds of meat at a time,” he said proudly.

“It’s totally different from a regular backyard barbecue. For one thing, most people use charcoal briquets or mesquite charcoal, which flavors the meat differently than mesquite logs.

“For another,” he said with a laugh, “I know what I’m doing.”

According to Vauclair and other vendors, selling food at the fair can be a grueling experience fraught with risk. Typically, the job requires 15-hour workdays, with nights spent in a camper or trailer parked nearby.

Paul Brousseau, who is specializing in selling crab sandwiches and crab croquettes, pointed out that “one rainy day can ruin your profit for the whole fair.”

Jackson said he sold $22,000 worth of potatoes and charbroiled corn at the fair last year, and is hoping to sell $30,000 worth this year. But he pointed out that he pays more than 22% of his gross sales just to rent a space on the midway, and added, “You’ve really got to hustle.”

One of the obvious secrets to success is offering a product that people are eager to try. Big, gooey cinnamon rolls sold at one stand are attracting lines of people every day.

On the other hand, one 30ish customer, reading the menu at a nearly deserted pancake and waffle stand recently, paused when he saw the word chocolate. “Chocolate waffles,” he said. “Those don’t sound very good.”

“We only use chocolate in pancakes,” the young woman behind the counter told him. “But chocolate pancakes don’t sound very good, either.”

Some of the ethnic foods available on the midway seem a trifle less than authentic, too. Ethnic food can provide an introduction to a foreign culture, but you can’t help wondering if you’re experiencing the real Japan by eating teriyaki beef on a stick. And do Poles really eat their sausages surrounded by an inch of fried corn-meal batter?

Unfortunately, some of the best-looking food at the fair isn’t even for sale. The top entries in the fair’s numerous baking competitions are displayed in glass cases in the west wing of the Grandstand Building. Some of these chocolate-layer cakes, fudge bars and fruit-nut muffins look positively mouth-watering, but they’re strictly for viewing.

“By the time the fair opens, the judging has already taken place and (the entries) are three days old,” explained Sheila Rose, the fair’s home arts superintendent. “They look wonderful, but in fact they’re really stale.”

And so the public must choose from among the omelets, finger steaks, fried zucchini, cream puffs, falafel sandwiches, hamburgers, chow mein, Indian fry bread, barbecued spare ribs and strawberries on a stick that are available on the midway. And, of course, the ubiquitous corn dogs.

“I can’t say that I know who invented corn dogs,” said Dave Marcus, the manager of one stand that was doing a brisk business. “I do know who invented mile-long corn dogs, though. We did. Everybody else was selling a short dog, so we started using the long ones and everyone liked them.”

As he talked, Marcus thrust Popsicle sticks into the ends of long, glistening wieners, dipped them into a tub of thick cornmeal batter, and dropped them sizzling into pans of oil.

“Some people,” he said, summing up years of experience as food vendor at county fairs, “don’t like to eat hot dogs in a bun.”