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Fried Dough Faceoff

We attended the American Indian Festival at the Gwinnett County Fairgrounds---a wonderful family experience by the way. This turned out to be our chance to not only indulge ourselves in fried dough but to compare two different types. Fried dough is a staple of world cuisine and it's always interesting to see what different peoples do with it.


Funnel cake is a carnival staple. In case you don't know, the dough is put in a funnel and dribbled in swirls into the grease. The result is a cake with a lot of texture and crunch. Our fried dough was a class example.



The next booth had Indian fry bread. This is a large pat of dough, about the size of a small pie tin, that is fried in dough for several minutes. Unlike funnel cake, fry bread is tender all the way through. You can get it with all sorts of toppings, both sweet and savory, but I chose honey. I thought that fry bread was a superb accompaniment to the honey---the cake is simple enough to allow the floweriness of the honey to come through. To me, the fry bread won the faceoff hands down, but it's hard to beat fried dough in any form.

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