Deep-Fried Starbucks Among the Insane Fare at San Diego County Fair

Served with whipped cream for a coffee, sugar and cream experience.

ByABC News
June 12, 2015, 11:37 AM
Starbucks coffee is being deep fried at the San Diego County Fair.
Starbucks coffee is being deep fried at the San Diego County Fair.
Courtesy San Diego County Fair

— -- State fairs have a pretty delicious approach to cuisine: Just deep-fry anything -- and we mean anything -- and you're good to go.

And it seems as though every year, state fairs get more and more creative with what they throw in fryer.

Coming in strong for the 2015 season is an item you may have previously thought was un-deep-fryable: coffee. That’s right, there’s deep-fried Starbucks at this year’s San Diego County Fair. Bacon A-Fair, a popular vendor there, takes finely-ground Starbucks coffee, infuses it in a sweet pastry dough, deep-fries it until golden, rolls it in sugar and serves it with whipped cream.

“So you have that coffee, sugar and cream effect,” Bacon A-Fair owner and deep-fried coffee inventor Mike Peterson told ABC News. “It gets golden crunchy on the outside and it’s sweet and gooey on the inside, and the coffee is melted into the dough and it gets a good buzz going.”

PHOTO: Ground coffee is fried, dusted in sugar and served with whipped cream for coffee with sugar and cream.
Ground coffee is fried, dusted in sugar and served with whipped cream for coffee with sugar and cream.

Peterson thought up the idea as a way to avoid going to the bathroom so many times after drinking liquid coffee.

“I thought it would be great to have a caffeine shot in a form that was not liquid, so I started playing aroun dwith different ways we could deep fry it,” he said. “We’ve been having a hard time even keeping it. They’ve been our big seller this year.”

Bacon A-Fair has other crazy items at this year’s fair -– which is the country’s fourth largest -– such as deep-fried foot-long bacon, bacon-wrapped turkey legs and a bacon wrapped wasabi bomb.