There’s a new phenomenon on the “if it’s ingestible, you-can-fry-it” scene: this year’s entrant into the Texas State Fair cooking competition — deep fried beer. Against the low-hanging fruit of deep fried latte, coke, and butter, all separate, previous entrants, it actually makes sense.

The reason I mention Rex Ryan is that he clearly loves beer and junk food and has probably 7 of the top 10 risk factors of a heart attack. I happen to be a Jets fan and his performance as the star of HBO’s Hard Knocks has probably made a lot of the country a supporter. He is a supreme leader and motivator, able to balance the delicate mix of authority, self-deprecation and respect for underlings. It’s a management case study on TV, except HBO ignores his brilliance as an elite defensive strategist, which underlies his credibility. So yeah, I don’t want Rex to discover more junk food because the Lap-band surgery hasn’t exactly worked.

And what is deep fried beer? By its creator, it’s been described as beer (Guinness) enclosed in a ravioli shape with pretzel dough. The trick is that it can’t sit too long or else the alcohol in the beer will vaporize (evaporate) and the remainder will be non-alcoholic, like how the vodka in penne alla vodka doesn’t have any alcohol content. So, the pretzel shell provides some protection from the high grease temperatures. I’ll guess that some still vaporizes and there’s a small amount of remaining alcohol. I doubt the competitive eating circuit would allow anything with booze in it, but it’d be an interesting experiment. Maybe the bigger guys could compete with Sonya Thomas in the hypothetical fried beer eating competition. Lofty goals, but we can only hope…

Our jeans not withstanding:  In Rex We Trust

Tags: food, Hard Knocks