Everything is bigger in Texas. Even the butter.
Not butter-flavored batter. Not a butter-based dip. Actual butter, frozen solid, wrapped in dough, and dropped straight into hot oil.
It sounds like a dare. It won an award.
The Invention
In 2009, Abel Gonzales Jr. entered a golf-ball-sized frozen butter ball, encased in dough and deep fried, into the Big Tex Choice Awards at the State Fair of Texas.
It won Most Creative.
The recipe was simple on paper. Whipped butter, nothing added except flavoring, frozen hard, wrapped in dough, fried until the outside turned golden and bready. Four versions hit the menu that year: plain, garlic, grape, and cherry, with the flavor built right into the butter itself, not served on the side.
Bite in and the outside acts like a hot biscuit or roll.
Sopapilla on the outside. A pool of hot melted butter on the inside.
The Guy Behind It
Gonzales wasn’t new to this. Fairgoers already knew him for Deep-Fried PB&J Banana Sandwich (Best Taste, 2005), Deep-Fried Coke (2006), and Deep-Fried Cookie Dough (2007). Three straight Big Tex wins before he ever touched butter.
Then came the miss. His entry the following year, “Fire & Ice,” deep-fried pineapple rings crowned with instant frozen whipped cream, produced more smoke than trophies. No win.
His response wasn’t to play it safe.
It was fried on top of fried on top of fried.
Deep-Fried Butter was the result, and it won Most Creative at the 2009 Big Tex Choice Awards.
Wait, Who Actually Invented This?
Here’s the part most fair recaps skip.
Gonzales wasn’t first.
Paula Deen demoed a fried butter concept on Food Network three years earlier, in the fall of 2006, based on a recipe from a fan who appeared on her show. Her version centered on butter blended with cream cheese, salt, and pepper, coated in flour, egg, and breadcrumbs.
Gonzales searched the internet before building his own recipe, found hers, and built something different anyway: pure whipped butter, nothing else mixed in, wrapped in dough instead of a breadcrumb coating.
Same wild idea. Different execution. His is the one that won an award, made national news, and got copied by state fairs across the country.
How Big This Actually Got
In 2009 alone, Gonzales sold around 35,000 orders. At three to four balls per order, that works out to roughly 140,000 individual balls of fried butter, sold over the fair’s three-week run.
The Dallas Morning News floated naming him Texan of the Year for it.
The Today Show ran with: “Move over, Twinkies: Deep-fried butter is here.”
By 2012, the New York Times was covering fried butter on a stick at the Iowa State Fair. Texas started it. Other states caught up.
The Takeaway
Deep-Fried Butter isn’t really a stunt food. It’s proof of what happens when a state fair keeps daring people to go one step further than the year before.
Butter was always the ingredient hiding inside every other fried thing at the fair already.
Gonzales just cut out the middleman.