We tried 12 ways to make a fried Oreo recipe that’s better than any state fair.

This recipe is for people in New Jersey. If you’re not from New Jersey, keep scrolling.

For legal purposes, it’s a joke. To understand the joy and importance of a fried Oreo, you really only have to be someone who has been to a theme park, tailgate, state fair, and/or lived through it as a child. My relationship with them falls into the former two categories. It wasn’t until I was barely an adult that I was first introduced to three of these boys on a gray, bitterly cold day at the Jets tailgate in the parking lot of MetLife Stadium. The guy who handed them to me confidently explained that the proper serving size was three almost too hot Oreos at once, and I had to eat them. NowRefresh the small fryer teetering on the side of the pickup truck in the middle of our setup.

I hated that football game, but I loved those Oreos. And that man! I married him, like, seven years later.

Every fried Oreo I’ve had since has been great, no matter how big a batch or fryer it came from. If you have received good and accurate items, you will have smelled them before you saw them. They’re reminiscent of funnel cakes, with a chewy sweetness that’s so familiar you’ll recognize it anywhere. Powdered sugar is in every bite, but it covers that puffy golden shell so well that you’d never know how much is actually there.

And if you’re still sitting there (for better or worse!) at the thought of someone frying Oreos, it’s by design. These items have been a staple of fun stalls and deli places since a then-teenager Charlie Boghossin opened the 2001 San Diego Convention Center. Tossed a bunch of Oreos into the deep fryer while working at the county fair. Why? “To get the attention of customers,” he explained Forbes Back in 2018. (There are unconfirmed reports of people experimenting and technically “creating” it as early as 1995, but popularity can be strongly traced.)

The common thread of all fried Oreos, though, is that they feel like an out-of-home experience. This made creating this recipe even more of an exciting challenge for our team! How can we achieve this festive, fair energy (and taste and texture) at home? Our Birmingham test kitchen colleagues Melissa Gray Identified the most important variables for this experiment: frying temperature, amount of Oreo filling, Oreo temperature, batch size, and toppings. Then he tested — and we tasted — batch after batch.

The first three variables go hand in hand. The higher the oil temperature we tested, the crunchier the shell and the less visible the Oreo filling—both in the frozen and unfrozen versions—became. The lower the temperature, the more unpleasantly melted and soggy both the cookies and the filling became. The batsman, of course, was sometimes still raw. Melissa noted that frying Double Stuff Oreos at 375° for two minutes was the “sweet spot,” giving a golden-brown fried exterior, a crunchy cookie, and a lush, crisp, intact layer of filling. You can find the full scope of its temperature and filling testing below.