State Fair of Texas, 2026 New Food, Big Tex Choice Awards Semi-Finalist
Located at Hans Mueller at Nimitz, Farm Pac on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, and Borracho Nacho Bar in Cotton Bowl Plaza
A turkey leg is meant to be gnawed off the bone, one hand, no plate.
A family that’s spent generations processing meat looked at that whole tradition and rolled it into something you eat with a sauce cup instead.
What This Thing Actually Is
Smoky chopped turkey leg meat gets loaded into a hand-rolled egg roll wrapper along with fire-roasted corn, sweet peppers, rich cream cheese, and seasoning.
It’s deep fried, then served with a choice of honey hot sauce or cilantro sauce on the side.
A Fair icon, the whole roasted turkey leg, broken down, chopped, and rebuilt inside an egg roll shell.
Glen and Sherri Kusak of Yoakum Packing Co. built it, served at three separate stands across the fairgrounds.
The Part That’s Actually Funny
Yoakum Packing is a family meat processing business out of Yoakum, Texas, the kind of operation that’s spent generations moving meat from slaughtering straight through to the counter. That’s a business built on doing one thing, whole cuts, at scale.
This entry does the opposite. It takes a cut that’s usually sold whole and on display, the turkey leg, and breaks it down into small pieces stuffed inside a wrapper most people associate with a completely different cuisine.
A meat processing family didn’t sell you the leg. They sold you what happens after somebody already ate the leg and chopped up what was left.
It made this year’s crowded new menu lineup, one of dozens of items introduced alongside a record 77 total Big Tex Choice Award entries in 2026.
Why Texas Keeps Doing This
Everything is bigger in Texas, and sometimes bigger means taking a food famous for its size and shrinking it down into bite pieces on purpose.
A whole turkey leg is already a Fair spectacle by itself. Texas built the version that chops that same spectacle into an egg roll instead, because a familiar flavor in an unfamiliar shape gets a second look from fairgoers who’ve had the leg a dozen times already.
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