State Fair of Texas, 2026 Big Tex Choice Awards Savory Finalist
A bag of chips is a snack. It rides in a lunchbox, not on top of a pizza.
Somebody put the whole bag on the pizza anyway.
What This Thing Actually Is
Start with hand-tossed, fresh dough. Add a jalapeno cheddar queso base instead of red sauce, then cover it in a fresh-grated blend of mozzarella and cheddar.
Bake it like a normal pizza. Then stop treating it like one.
After it comes out of the oven, the pie gets buried under handfuls of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, a drizzle of jalapeno queso blanco, a swipe of house buffalo buttermilk ranch, and a final dusting of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos dust over the whole thing.
A pizza that ends its life covered in a snack food most people eat straight out of the bag with orange fingers.
The Part That’s Actually Funny
Cheetos already come seasoned, crunchy, and finished. They don’t need a pizza.
A pizza doesn’t need them either. Both foods work completely fine on their own.
Gluing them together reads as a dare instead of a recipe.
This one came out of Tom Grace’s kitchen, the same concessionaire behind Burger Chop Tater Tacos, the dish that actually won Best Taste, Savory this year.
One entry took the trophy. The other one made it onto the finalist list wearing a bag of chips as a topping. Both came from the same guy.
That’s a concessionaire covering his bases. One safe crowd pleaser, one dare, both good enough to make the cut out of a record 77 entries from 46 concessionaires in 2026.
Why Texas Keeps Doing This
Everything is bigger in Texas, and apparently that includes the Cheetos dust.
Nobody needed a pizza that also functions as a delivery system for a snack aisle staple. Texas built one anyway, because the version that makes people say “wait, they did what” beats the version that just tastes fine.
Right now, the Cheetos dust is doing more talking than the guy who put it there.
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