'Hidden' Fair Foods Are Twists On Old Favorites

FALCON HEIGHTS, Minn. (WCCO) -- One tradition for many families at the Great Minnesota Get-Together is to sample all the new foods.

The state fair is advertising 51 new items, but it turns out there are about a dozen more. Many are just twists on an old favorite, adding a new flavor or ingredient. They're a bit more difficult to find, so we stopped by several vendors to find their off-list items.

If there's one food that says Minnesota, it might be lefse, with the Swedish meatball in a close second.

"Ours are very well-liked, and everyone thinks they're delicious," said one employee at Lynn's Lefse.

Lynn's decided to combine the best of both worlds for their newest fair food. A buttered lefse with Swedish meatballs inside.

"They're both Scandinavian," one customer said. "If you have to put something inside there, it might as well be Swedish meatballs."

Just around the corner at Granny's Kitchen Fudge Puppy, it's always time for breakfast or dessert with this new waffle-based dish: the caramel macaroon fudge puppy.

It's like a Samoa Girl Scout cookie on a stick: coconut and white chocolate are baked into a Belgian waffle, then topped with whipped cream, caramel and more toasted coconut.

Once the food coma sets in, Moe and Joe's new coconut latte is a quick pick-me-up. Two shots of espresso with steamed milk, a little coconut, a little vanilla and topped with whipped cream.

A new blood orange sangria spritzer is another alternative for the non-coffee drinker. Don't worry: it's non-alcoholic.

The new food over at Fried Fruit plays off a crowd favorite.

"We were like, 'What else can we do with these?' and we thought, 'Let's add bacon. Everybody loves bacon,'" Kristin Erlandson of Fried Fruit said.

The original deep fried olives are now wrapped in the popular pork product, too.

"Bacon goes with everything," Erlandson said.