NYS Fair Food Hall of Fame #3: Milk, nostalgia in a 7

Mia serves up a white and chocolate milk at the Milk Bar at the New York State Fair. (Charlie Miller | [email protected])

Earlier this year, syracuse.com set out on a mission to identify the Top 10 all-time New York State Fair foods – the ones that belong in what we’re dubbing the The New York State Fair Food Hall of Fame.

We asked more than two dozen frequent fairgoers to pick their favorites. And our reporters and editors here at syracuse.com weighed in as well.

These are the iconic foods that define the NYS Fair. The ones you can’t go without on a visit to the fair. The ones you tell first-timers they MUST try.

Each day leading up to the Fair, we’ll “induct” another Fair food into our completely-made-up NYS Fair Food Hall of Fame.

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Geddes, N.Y. — The premise of this story is like a Sunday dinner conversation with your grandfather.

“Sonny, I remember when you could get a cup of ice-cold milk at the Fair for a shiny quarter!” he’d say all too loudly while pounding the table.

You know what, Gramps? You still can.

That’s right. A 7-ounce cup of white or chocolate moo juice will set you back two dimes and a nickel, just as it has since 1983. And that’s one of the reasons milk at the Milk Bar inside the Dairy Building is No. 3 in our New York State Fair Food Hall of Fame.

State Fair milk is nostalgia in a plastic cup branded with I ♥ MILK. New York has been selling its milk here since 1952. It once was free, then a nickel, then a dime, and ultimately a quarter. The state had doubled the price to 50 cents in 2016, but the predictable uproar got the politicians to quickly change their mind. Nothing has touched the cost since, not even today’s inflation woes.

“Folks stood in line for it when they were kids, and now they’re waiting in the line with their kids to get the milk,” said Dan Welch, the executive director of the Cornell Cooperative Extension. “It’s iconic. It’s one of New York’s top agricultural products at a reasonable price.”

The Cooperative Extension, which runs the Milk Bar, gets its inventory from farms throughout Central and Western New York. The tanks that hold the milk are kept at 35 degrees, 5 degrees cooler than the typical home refrigerator.

Like the one-buck potato booth in the Horticulture Building, lines to get milk can be absurd. But the system’s efficienciency keeps them moving quickly. Just dump some coins or a dollar bill into a machine at the front of the line, and you get brass-colored tokens in return. You then hand over the tokens as you place your order with one of the eight milk baristas.

Sure, a quarter for a cup of whole milk seems like a going-back-to-school-sale bargain. If you do the math, though, you will find out you’re not breaking even. A gallon has 128 ounces. The Milk Bar sells its pasteurized products in 7-ounce cups. If you leave no room at the top to prevent spillage, that’s 18.2857143 State Fair servings per gallon. In other words, you’re paying $4.57 per gallon. Wegmans and Byrne Dairy are selling gallons of milk for $2.89.

“Like the Tully’s chicken tenders, you can buy milk at home. But it’s just not the same,” said radio personality Amy Robbins. She an official voter in our Food Hall of Fame because she’s always at the Fair, or it seems that way because her voices tells us the time every 15 minutes. “I am not a milk fan, but I have to admit those little tokens jingling their way into an ice cold glass of milk at your fingertips is enough to get anyone excited.”

Chocolate outsells white milk by a 12-to-1 ratio, said Welch.

If you get tired of white or chocolate milk, stick around. The milk bar will once again add strawberry to the taps over Labor Day weekend. Milk Bar officials hope they get more than the 750 gallons they received last year.

While dairy purists may consider strawberry milk blasphemy, Welch said it’s popular. “It makes you feel like a kid,” he said.

And it sells out quickly. Last year, those strawberry taps went dry after roughly 13,714 cups. That was just a day after it became available.

The NYS Fair's milk bar ran out of strawberry milk on Sunday, about a day and a half after it was first offered.Charlie Miller | [email protected]

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Charlie Miller finds the best in food, drink and fun across Central New York. Contact him at (315) 382-1984, or by email at [email protected]. (AND he pays for what he and his guests eat and drink, just so you know.) You can also find him under @HoosierCuse on Twitter and on Instagram. Sign up for his free weekly Where Syracuse Eats newsletter here.

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