The 13 best only-in-Minnesota foods
Sometimes you've just gotta shake your head and say to yourself, "only in Minnesota". Usually it's after the Timberwolves do something stupid... AGAIN, or while you're explaining our region to out-of-towners, but it also happens when you order one of these 13 foods you only see in our great state.
Jucy Lucy
We've been putting the cheese on the inside of our burgers for as long as we've been spelling "Jucy" wrong (mid-20th century) and serving them to Barack Obama since June 26, 2014.
Lutefisk
Trying finding cod soaked in lye and served at room temperature in New York City... at least, try finding it like that intentionally.
Hot dish
Americans have always struggled over what to do with weeks worth of leftovers going bad in the fridge and all those extra cans of cream of mushroom soup in the pantry, but only Minnesotans thought to mix them all into a casserole dish then top them with tater tots and melted cheese.
Lefse
The Norwegian tortilla is a dish best served with butter (and cold).
Tots
Not just a cog in the glorious machine that is hot dish, we see your innovative sweet potato fries and raise you entire menus dedicated to the art of cooking tots to golden-crunchy-on-the-outside, molten-chewy-on-the-inside perfection.
"Bars"
For more than a century, proud MN kitchens have believed that brownies need not only be chocolate, but instead they could be any number of dense, gooey flavor combos served in bar form.
Butter princesses
Alright, so we don't eat the gigantic butter sculptures of Princess Kay of the Milky Way at the MN State Fair, but we probably could if we really wanted.
Pull-tabs
They're not actually food, but the somehow-always-legal-even-when-lottery-wasn't paper version of slots are almost like dessert at any small-town bar... only vastly more expensive/less satisfying.
Butter coffee
The "bulletproof coffee" trend? Pfft. Minnesota housewives have been lacing their black coffee with spoonfuls of butter since the great-Grandma of whoever coined the phrase "bulletproof coffee" was... well, alive for starters.
Krumkake
The brittle, hand-rolled Norwegian waffle cookie is like a mini ice-cream cone -- only instead of ice cream, it holds powdered sugar, and instead of one you eat like 23.
Hmong food
With the country's largest population of Hmong immigrants comes the country's best Hmong market.
SPAM
Unique to Minnesota? Thanks to those rascally Hawaiians and their musubi, no. From Minnesota? Every last sodium-filled, processed meatstuffs morsel.
Fresh pheasant
You're not a real Minnesotan unless you've got a cap on your tooth from accidentally biting into a piece of buckshot during a post-hunt pheasant dinner.