SORTEDfood Tours Des Moines, Iowa

When we announced to friends, family and even our community members that we were going to Iowa, we were met with a fairly standard retort… Why?

And at the time, if we're honest, we didn’t have a great response apart from explaining what we were doing there - spending 24 hours exploring the state capital, Des Moines, Iowa and using another day to go around the Iowa State Fair. Little did we know that we'd return home having experienced one of the most unique days in our lives, and probably eating the best ice cream we have ever had!! Let’s start with the State Fair.

If you’ve never been to a State Fair before, we will try to explain the scale of it… Run over 10 days, the State Fair pulled in over 1.1 million attendees. That’s over 110,000 people every day, filling up the 445 acres of fairgrounds! There’s thrill rides, music concerts, contests, animal shows, agriculture stands, farming demonstrations, a life-size sculpture of a cow made out of butter… and to top it off, more than 200 food vendors selling some of the craziest food you’ve ever seen -- usually served to you on a stick!!

We ate EVERYTHING - pork chops on sticks, cheesecakes on sticks, deep fried twinkies on sticks, buckets of cookies, elephant ears, pork tenderloin sandwiches, shake up lemonades. The list was endless!

I could not recommend enough that you visit a State Fair, it’s a complete sensory overload and like nothing you’ve ever seen before, and as the Iowa State Fair advertises…nothing compares!

Now, did we say earlier that we had the best ice cream EVER whilst in Des Moines, Iowa?! Yes - we really believe we did!

The team behind Black Cat Ice Cream say they set out to make the ‘best ice cream on Earth’, and I honestly think they might be close. Using local dairy and organic produce, Black Cat makes their ice cream the old fashioned way - in small batches, but packed with BIG flavours!

Black Cat don’t just add flavours to their ice creams, they add complete dishes - so instead of the flavours of blueberry pancakes, there were actually fluffy blueberry pancakes folded into my ice cream - and the difference in flavour, texture and the entire eating experience was sensational!

But it didn’t stop there, we had brown butter cookie dough, coffee and caramel donuts, vanilla and peanut butter pretzel ice creams, every single ice cream was out of this world.

Needless to say, every pre-conception we had about Iowa was completely blown out of the water, and we have at least 10 answers to people who ask ‘why go to Iowa?’