KAYLIN BETTINGER / Anchorage Daily News: Denali Cream Puffs

As the Alaska State Fair drew near this year, the usual food fantasies took hold. Potatoes, fresh cut, whisper-thin and fried crisp. Turkey legs, hot and drippy with barbecue sauce. Tamales. Buttered corn. Pork chops. Elephant ears, crispy on the outside and elastic on the inside, gritty with cinnamon-sugar. Peach pie.

But then, from some mean part of my brain, a dangerous question snaked its way through: Just what would a belly full of all that actually do to me, diet-wise?

(Fair food spoiler alert: think carefully about whether you want to know the answer to that question. Ignorance is bliss, friends. Turn back now. I won’t judge.)

I couldn’t help it. I was curious. How bad could it be?

Karol Fink, a dietitian with the state, agreed to ride out to the fair with me on Thursday to investigate. Fink, a trim woman in her forties, manages the state’s obesity prevention and control program but she’s not too uptight about food. On the drive in, she confessed she couldn’t be a vegetarian, in part because she has a thing for pulled-pork sandwiches. I could tell we were going to get along.

We decided to come up with a plan for how to eat well at the fair, including some serious indulgence, but without blowing too much more than 2,000 calories, the average recommended daily for an adult. The main strategy was portion size. We planned to share everything. That way we could sample a lot without getting stuffed.

Before we left, I asked readers on Facebook and Twitter what they liked to eat. The conversation blew up. Everyone has an opinion on fair food.

Readers went off about Parmesan tacos, fireweed honey ice cream, turkey legs and funnel cakes. The most mentioned, hands down, was the Denali Cream Puff. That was our first stop.

A cream puff, which costs $7, is made from French pastry dough filled with a cup or so of whipped cream/custard mix, topped with various sauces, including homemade caramel. It looked delicious. Fink pulled out her scale and we set one on. She calculated the calories: about 850.

We decided we’d go savory first and then loop back. We considered a giant turkey leg (1,135 calories) but then kept on. I asked Fink what her favorite fair food was. Oysters, she said. They are 40 calories each, with little fat and omega-3s. We passed that booth but neither of us was in the oyster mood. We settled on a blue corn, green chile and jack cheese tamale with beans and rice from Rae’s Gourmet Tamales for $10. Calorie count? Maybe 450, not including rice and beans, and it had nutrients and fiber.

While we ate our tamale, the booth for Porkey’s Porkchop On a Stick and Alaskan Golden Cheese Nuggets caught both our eyes, drawing us with its siren song of deep-fried cheese. We got in line and came back with both nuggets and a chop.

I tried the chop first, dipped in applesauce. It was a satisfying protein burst, though I kind of wanted a knife and fork, which would have made sharing easier. It was also a good deal at $4.50. Calories: 450. Fink approved. Next, we dove into the curds. I watched Fink pop one, then another in her mouth.
“These are good,” she said. “Like grilled cheese.”

Then she put them on the scale and calculated the calories: somewhere in the neighborhood of 950.

I asked Fink what deep-frying did to food. It added 25 calories per ounce, all from fat, she said. I decided against another curd.

We made a pass by Friar Tucks, where we discussed getting corn. An ear of corn without butter is only 50 calories, Fink said. Then she did the math for corn dunked in the stand’s mix of butter and I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter. That added another 200 calories, quadrupling the count. Who likes corn without butter? We were still full. We moved on, cruising around to the row of food booths by the rides.

Fink is a fan of things in pockets, like gyros or pocket sandwiches. We had a seafood pocket from Seafood Alaska. For $11 and 600 calories, it packed sauce-smothered steamed snow crab and shrimp and veggies in a whole-wheat pita. Gyros have more fat but similar calorie counts, she said. Either would be a decent choice.

Next, we rolled by Granny’s, one of my longtime favorites. I learned a ¾-pound block of fresh-cut curly fries would set me back 900 calories. That’s without a luscious Cheez Whiz bath. I tried not to think about the years when I’d eaten most of one alone.

Next came the gantlet between the elephant ears and the funnel cakes, which I also usually can’t resist. The elephant ear is made with yeasted dough that doesn’t have much sugar. The funnel cake is made with an egg batter similar to a crepe. I wondered which was more healthy. Did the ear technically have less surface area to absorb grease? Did the funnel cake have more protein? Fink said she didn’t know, but they were 800 calories, more than half from fat, with no nutritional value.

I figured that meant she didn’t want to share one.

Next we stopped by a couple healthy spots. At Vagabond Blues, a favorite of fair vendors looking for a break from deep-fried fare, I had a shot of fresh-squeezed apple juice (surprisingly, 225 calories). And at Bushes Bunches, which sells fresh produce, Fink found one of the fair’s healthiest offerings: vegetable soup. It’s $6, 150 calories.

We decided to finish out our day at The Boardwalk, which sells all things peach. The pie looked great but we thought we’d be healthier if we went for peaches and cream. Turned out we were wrong. The “and cream” part killed it, with 320 calories of half-and-half. With the peach, that was about 400 calories and uber-fatty. The pie was probably 300 calories, with less fat, Fink said.

We had been curious whether the calories we burned walking around would offset what we ate, so Fink wore a pedometer. When we got back to the car, she figured out that in three hours of walking around, we burned about 200 calories. Maybe four bites of pork chop. But I didn’t feel bad. We’d stayed inside our calorie limit and I was full. On the drive home, I noticed that unlike previous block-o-fries years, I didn’t have that greasy and semi-nauseated post-fair feeling. That was kind of nice.

Though, secretly, I kind of wished I’d had an elephant ear.

What's your fair food strategy?