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When you haven't eaten all day and you're staring at 700 pounds of butter through a freezer window, it whets the appetite.
That hunger will quickly dissipate once you enter the freezer and the smell of all that fermented cream hits you like, well, 700 pounds of butter.
By the time the famous butter sculpture inside Promontory Hall at the Utah State Fair is completed, sculptors Matt McNaughtan and Debbie Brown will each have spent more than 40 hours inside the 10-by-7-foot freezer. It's kept at 48 degrees so that those butter cows don't turn into something out of a Salvador Dali painting.
They're creating this year's sculpture, called "Uncommonly Good First Date," a depiction of a bull and a cow being served by a goat at an old-fashioned ice cream parlor.
Once I escaped the freezer, my hunger pangs returned. That's when I set out to fulfill my assignment for the first day of the fair: to eat. And eat. And eat. And, preferably, with as much ranch dressing as possible.
I imagine the No. 1 reason people go to fairs is to buy spas. And I suspect the second reason is to eat fair food — while in the process of seeing how many different spellings of Navajo tacos are advertised.
Of this year's new menu offerings, one item attracting attention is "deep-fried, chocolate-covered bacon on a stick," offered by J&J Concessions and its owner, Jonathan Searle.
At past Utah fairs, Searle's most popular food was a deep-fried, peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. This year, he's hoping his chocolate-covered bacon is another winner.
The Springdale resident said he scrapped plans to sell deep-fried Gummi bears after the candy turned into "oily lava." But he was recently successful in deep-frying green Jell-O, which might be offered in the future.
"We are a food-eating people, and people love deep-fried food," Searle said of Utahns. That's including three strips of raw, thick-cut Hormel bacon ribboned onto a stick and dipped in oil until they're crispy, then drizzled with Hershey's chocolate syrup.
"It has all the food groups," Searle claimed. "It's got canola oil as your vegetables, right?"
Despite the lack of ranch dressing to dip them in, the item tasted exactly how I'd expect bacon with chocolate sauce would taste. Delicious.
The next stop of my gastronomic trip through the fair was to try another new offering: the deep-fried pickle on a stick offered at the Colossal Onion Blossom booth. It was a big hit at events such as the Western Idaho Fair, where booth owner Louis Deckard, of Wilder, Idaho, said he sold 100 gallons of dill pickles.
Based on what he called his "demographics research," he predicted that Utahns would eat 100 gallons' worth.
I'm not sure if that's a compliment.
The dill pickle is double-dipped in his special batter. Deckard wouldn't divulge the recipe, but using a tool from my journalism toolbox — nagging — he revealed that the batter contained herbs, spices and garlic. Thankfully, once it was completed, you can dip the fried pickle in the provided ranch dressing.
"Because it's the State Fair, there are no calories allowed on state grounds," Deckard said.
I had no reason to believe he was lying because carnival barkers are known for their honesty.
Ranch dressing was also served with the new hot wings served at the Authentic Greek Gyros booth owned by Wayne's Concessions. Bonnie McGlothen, Wayne's wife, said that gyros and alligator on a stick are their best-selling items, which makes sense for an authentic Greek concessionaire.
After the fried bacon, fried pickle and fried hot wings, I cleansed my palate with two of my traditional favorites, pork chop on a stick from Old West BBQ and a meat pie from Morrison's Aussie Travelers Pies. The latter didn't have ranch dressing, but the ladle of brown gravy made up for the oversight.
It was finally time for a drink. As I made my way to try the fresh-squeezed prickly pear lemonade, I saw a sign at Richard's Roundup BBQ. It advertised its Sweet & Sassy Barbecue Sauce as "so good, you can drink it with a straw." Why kill a thirst with lemonade when you can slurp barbecue sauce through a straw?