Review: Fried Butter

Who comes up with this stuff?

I mean, what spirit moves you to try to fry butter? I thought originally that maybe some innovator out there was just trying to assemble odd foods in alphabetical order, but then I thought of the Zucchini Weeni andthere went that theory. I had other ideas -- maybe there's some competition going on, maybe it's random -- but whatever it is, I think it'd make a great reality TV series. They could call it "Fry Away: Unlikely Adventures with Food."

Anyway, I started thinking about all this when I came across a fried butter booth at the Dixie Classic Fair. (One of two I saw.) Making fried butter at this booth was simple: part of a quarter-pound of butter is impaled on a stick. That's dipped in a frying medium and then dunked in hot oil. After a few minutes of floating around it's fished out, drizzled with caramel sauce, and there you go. The snack cost $4.

I don't know what I had in mind, but this wasn't it. I had hazy visions of whipped butter, flavored and mixed with frying medium. My husband and I carefully carried the fried butter to a place where we could sit down. And then we both stared at it.

That's all I could think about I contemplated the fried butter, even though my husband reminded me that the butter had been floating around in oil and was certainly melted. Finally he took a bite. As he predicted, the butter was gone, melted into the frying medium.

"Pancakes," he said, wielding a napkin. "It tastes like pancakes with lots of butter."

Gingerly I tried a bite. And he was almost right. Instead of pancakes with butter it tasted like butter with a little bit of pancakes. If you like butter, you'll be thrilled. I like butter but I don't like this much butter. We weren't able to finish it.

Not my favorite, but not my least favorite either -- that would probably be the fried Coca-Cola. It remains to be seen whether the fried butter will get to the State Fair -- and what happened to the chocolate-covered bacon?