Can You Deep-Fry Coca-Cola? Texas Figured It Out

Fish gonna swim, birds gonna fly, haters gonna hate, and state fairs gonna fry. Were truer (or more poetic) words ever spoken? Yeah, probably, but that's about as deep as we like to get around here — as deep as a vat of bubbling oil in a fairground food cart. 

Our favorite fair foods tend to be foods on a stick, and we have a special spot in our artery-clogged hearts for the ones that are wacky but delicious. You can't get much more wacky than deep-fried Coke, though, since how in the hell can you possibly fry something that's already liquid? One man figured it out: Abel Gonzalez, the culinary innovator that Andrew Zimmern, on the Travel Channel dubbed, "the Willy Wonka of the Texas State Fair."

The way Gonzalez managed to deep-fry Coke was to use it to flavor batter, then fry the batter and top it with Coke syrup, which is all of the flavorings and sugar found in the soda without the water and fizz. To finish things off, the fried Coke was topped off with cinnamon sugar, whipped cream, and a cherry. This product made its debut at the fair in 2006 and was named the most creative new item of the year. While the treat might sound like a stomachache in a souvenir glass (and came in at a whopping 830 calories), cola syrup, when it's not making drinks or doughy treats, is a product sold to relieve nausea.

Once Gonzalez invented fried Coke, what was left for him to do but top that feat the following year with deep-fried beer? His version, created for a beer company, took the form of beer-marinated potato chips sprinkled with beer-flavored salt. He then came up with deep-fried butter, which debuted in 2009 at the Texas State Fair. Even though butter, unlike Coke, is more or less solid, it needs to be frozen and batter-dipped, then cooked up quick before the butter melts.

Other fried beverages, too, have taken a page from Gonzalez' deep-fry bible, with the very similar deep-fried Pepsi appearing at the Indiana State Fair in 2007. (Here's a blast from the past — it cost just $4 for eight Pepsi puffs!) In 2011, the Wisconsin State Fair — of course, it would be Wisconsin — rolled out its own deep-fried beer, which differed from Gonzalez' in that it was made of dough filled with beer, then fried and served with cheese sauce. 

The same fair followed this up with a deep-fried brandy Old Fashioned in 2016, consisting of orange cake with a brandy-cream cheese filling, but in 2024 it went in a non-boozy direction with deep-fried lemonade bites made from batter-dipped Hawaiian rolls with a lemon curd filling and lemon sugar topping. Nearly a decade earlier, the Delaware State Fair also introduced fried lemonade, although this was a citrusy trifecta of lemon cake dipped in lemon batter and topped with lemon sauce.