‘Deep Fried Masters’ celebrates fun fair food

By David Martindale

Fort Worth Star-Telegram

No matter what it is you’re eating, there’s something almost magical about deep-fried fair food.

It can be as simple as a corndog or a candy bar. It can be as unconventional as butter or cactus bites. The menu gets interesting when the food comes out of a deep fryer.

Just ask Abel Gonzales Jr. and Butch Benavides, a couple of State Fair of Texas champions whose legendary experiments with fryers straddle the line between genius and madness.

“If you’re thinking about having a sensible dinner, a steak is always good, a lobster is high-end and a salad is delicious and healthy for you,” Gonzales says. “But when you deep-fry something, you make food fun.”

That’s certainly the case in Destination America’s new travel-and-food series, “Deep Fried Masters,” a giddy celebration of mutant meals that are battered and browned to a golden crisp.

The series, which premieres at 10 tonight, treks across the country and tests the culinary inventiveness of talented cooks as they serve such-deep fried delicacies as bacon jam hotdogs, mac and cheese and lemonade.

“People want to try something that’s new and different and unique,” Benavides says. “That’s why the deep- fried movement, if you want to call it that, has taken off.”

Gonzales, a Dallas native, is famous for creating such crazy concoctions as fried cookie dough, fried jambalaya and fried butter. Benavides, also born and raised in Dallas, introduced the world to deep-fried Snickers on a stick, fried bacon-cinnamon rolls and fried cactus bites.

Along with Jim Stacy, an Atlanta cook who is world- famous for his corndogs, Gonzales and Benavides are judges on “DFM.”

Each week, the show pits eight fry-happy cooks in a battle to win bragging rights and a “Golden Corndog” statuette.

Tonight’s episode takes viewers to Texas. But instead of the State Fair in Dallas, the unofficial capital of deep-fried food, the show goes to Fiesta San Antonio.

Gonzales said his favorite invention was the deep-fried French fries and brisket.

“It was outstanding,” he says. “And it was so obvious. My whole philosophy is to take something that’s really obvious and simple and deep- fry it. Then, when it comes out of the fryer, you think, ‘How did somebody not already think of this? How is this not already out there?’

“Well, how do you not combine French fries and brisket? It was the perfect idea, the perfect deep-fried food. That’s the one that impressed me most.”