At New Jersey’s Boardwalks, They’ll Deep Fry Just About Anything

SEASIDE HEIGHTS, N.J. – Pizza, sausage and peppers and fresh-cut fries may be Jersey Shore staples, but eventually someone on the boardwalk looks at an Oreo and asks the inevitable question: What happens if we batter it and drop it in hot oil?

The answer helped create an entire category of boardwalk food. From Seaside Heights to Wildwood, deep-fried desserts now sit alongside funnel cakes and zeppoles, with vendors finding increasingly unlikely things to batter, fry and bury beneath powdered sugar.

• Seaside Heights has long been associated with fried Oreos, fried pickles, cheese balls, funnel cakes and other deep-fried boardwalk creations.
• In Wildwood, current menus include deep-fried cheesecake, Uncrustables, cookie dough bites and Oreos.
• The attraction isn’t necessarily culinary sophistication. It’s eating something at the Shore that you’d probably never consider frying at home.

Seaside Heights: Where Almost Anything Can Meet the Fryer

Walk the Seaside Heights boardwalk hungry and restraint can become difficult.

There are the familiar choices first: funnel cake, zeppoles, fries and battered foods that have been boardwalk fixtures for generations. Then things start getting stranger.

Fried Oreos have become so common that they’re barely unusual anymore. In fact, they are the norm these days.

Seaside Heights’ deep-frying culture started years ago, finding fried pickles, fried Oreos and other foods going into the oil.

Now, cookie dough, cakes, Reese’s Cups and Twinkies have been part of the conversation.

The point is excess.

Boardwalk food isn’t supposed to resemble the dinner waiting at home. It’s hot, portable, messy and usually best consumed while walking past arcade games with powdered sugar falling onto your shirt.

Fry-me-up at 701 Boardwalk makes that deep-fried identity fairly explicit just in its name.

Seaside Heights also has another fried specialty with a local pedigree: cheese balls.

Steaks Unlimited, just off the boardwalk, has long promoted itself as the home of the original cheese balls, a Seaside Heights creation that gained additional attention during the town’s reality television era.

The combination of fried dough, cheese, potatoes and battered sweets has made the fryer nearly as essential to the Seaside food experience as the pizza oven.

Wildwood Takes Deep-Fried Dessert Even Further

Then there is Wildwood.

The enormous boardwalk has enough food stands to turn an evening stroll into a test of just how much sugar and frying oil one person can reasonably encounter.

But one of the clearest examples is Wally’s Corner Fast Food at 3420 Boardwalk.

Its current dessert menu reads almost like someone challenged the kitchen to find things that shouldn’t go into a deep fryer.

There’s a deep-fried Uncrustable, finished with powdered sugar.

Then deep-fried Oreos.

Still too ordinary?

There’s deep-fried cheesecake.

And deep-fried chocolate chip cookie dough bites.

All are joined by the old reliable: funnel cake, itself essentially an elaborate celebration of batter meeting hot oil.

Another Wildwood spot, Grab A Wiener at Zein’s Corner, lists funnel cake and deep-fried Oreos, while recent customers have also described ordering fried cookie dough.

The phenomenon stretches beyond individual stands. Fried Oreos are made by dipping the cookies in funnel-cake batter, frying them until golden and finishing them with powdered sugar — essentially wrapping one dessert inside another dessert.

That’s very difficult to make more boardwalk than that.

Why Deep-Fried Everything Belongs at the Jersey Shore

There is a practical reason this food thrives on boardwalks.

Frying is fast.

A stand can take a relatively inexpensive item, dip it in batter, cook it in minutes and hand it across the counter hot. Powdered sugar, chocolate sauce or another topping finishes the job.

But practicality only explains part of it.

The real product is novelty.

Nobody needs a deep-fried Oreo. Almost nobody arrives at the beach thinking about a deep-fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Then they see one.

That’s the moment boardwalk food is built around.

Families share an order. Someone takes a picture. A kid tries something ridiculous for the first time. Adults who wouldn’t dream of eating fried cheesecake on a Wednesday night at home suddenly decide it makes perfect sense at 10 p.m. in Wildwood.

And somehow, on the boardwalk, it does.

The Funnel Cake Started It All — Sort Of

Deep-frying dessert certainly didn’t originate at the Jersey Shore.

Fried dough traditions go back centuries and appear in cuisines around the world. Funnel cake became deeply associated with American fairs, carnivals and amusement destinations because it was inexpensive, dramatic to make and easy to serve.

The boardwalk was its natural habitat.

Once vendors had vats of hot oil and funnel-cake batter ready to go, experimentation wasn’t much of a leap.

Drop the batter alone and you get funnel cake.

Put an Oreo inside it and you’ve created another product.

Do the same with candy, cookie dough or cheesecake and suddenly one fryer can produce an entire dessert menu.

That’s how the modern boardwalk arms race works. Yesterday’s outrageous novelty becomes today’s standard menu item, forcing somebody to come up with the next thing.

Two Boardwalks, One Very Unhealthy Mission

Seaside Heights and Wildwood have different personalities.

Seaside is compact and intensely Jersey, with generations of pizza, cheesesteaks, sausage, fries and sweets packed into a relatively short stretch.

Wildwood’s boardwalk feels enormous by comparison, with food competing against amusement piers, arcades, shops and the constant movement of the tram car.

Yet both understand the same basic principle.

Beach calories are different.

At least that’s what everyone tells themselves before ordering something that began life as a cookie, sandwich or piece of cheesecake and ended up submerged in boiling oil.

There are plenty of reasons to visit a New Jersey boardwalk.

Eating something deep-fried simply because someone had the audacity to deep-fry it remains one of the best.

What can you find deep-fried on New Jersey boardwalks?
Beyond funnel cake and fries, current and historical menus include Oreos, cheesecake, cookie dough, Uncrustables, pickles, candy and other rotating creations.

Seaside Heights has its own fried-food traditions.
Fried Oreos and funnel cakes are common boardwalk treats, while the town is also known for its longtime cheese-ball tradition.

Wildwood may be the place to test your deep-fried limits.
Current Wildwood menus offer everything from deep-fried Oreos to cheesecake, cookie dough bites and powdered-sugar-covered Uncrustables.

Sources: Current Wildwood restaurant menus; Roadside America; Shore Guide; Seaside Heights and Wildwood business listings

Editor’s Note: This article was originally written in July, but somehow sat on the editorial floor. It was meant to promote the boardwalks at the Jersey Shore, but like loose change, fell through the cracks until somebody crawling under the boardwalk found it after the summer.