How well do you know state fair food?

Test your knowledge, from sriracha corn dogs to deep-fried turkducken.

Fire up the fryer! Break out the bacon! Sharpen those little stick thingies! State fair season is upon us, bringing with it our great annual outpouring of culinary madness: fair food. If a thing can be fried, it’ll be fried. If it can’t (Kool-aid, anyone?) it’ll be fried anyway. If it’s unimaginable, it’ll be imagined. As Goya would have said, “The sleep of reason brings forth deep-fried doughnut burgers with jalapeno bacon jam.”

Do you feel like you’ve got your brain wrapped around fair food? Like you understand the line between the undiscovered indulgence and the unholy. Allow us to test your perspicacity and gustatory fortitude, below. Winner gets a blue ribbon.

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Patrick Clinton is The Counter's contributing editor. He's also a long-time journalist and educator. He edited the Chicago Reader during the politically exciting years that surrounded the election of the city’s first black mayor, Harold Washington; University Business during the early days of for-profit universities and online instruction; and Pharmaceutical Executive during a period that saw the Vioxx scandal and the ascendancy of biotech. He has written and worked as a staff editor for a variety of publications, including Chicago, Men’s Journal, and Outside (for which he ran down the answer to everyone’s most burning question about porcupines). For seven years, he taught magazine writing and editing at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.