Aemilia Wollak came up with the brilliant idea for a Krunchy Kimchi Dog as her entry in last year’s Washington County Fair Foodie Challenge.

The winning recipe, which featured a hot dog topped with kimchi, cucumbers, crushed potato chips and a squiggle of an umami-packed mayonnaise infused with gochujang, a sweet fermented red chile paste, was a featured item at the Washington County Fair’s 4-H Booth last summer.

Aemilia, 13, of Grant, is now back in the kitchen testing recipes for this year’s Fair Foodie Challenge, a competition that involves 4-H members creating a new breakfast item or lunch/dinner item. At least 65 percent of ingredients have to come from a list of the most common foods stocked at the fair.

The deadline for submitting an idea is Jan. 28.

Aemilia is fine-tuning an entry in the breakfast division: a sausage patty dipped in waffle batter and cooked either on a griddle or in a waffle maker. The cooked product would have a blueberry compote on top. “I’m pretty sure I’m going to call it ‘The Belgian Banger,’” she said.

She’s also planning to enter a lunch/dinner item: a miso salad served with a grilled chicken breast “and a crunchy topping on top that is going to be made out of fried garlic and potato chips because I thought it needed more texture.”

Aemilia, a seventh grader at Mahtomedi Middle School, has been a member of the Soil Savers 4-H Club since she was in kindergarten. She lives with her family on a hobby farm “with 12 chickens, two dogs and one cat,” she said.

Aemilia loves experimenting in the kitchen, she said. She is planning to start her own freeze-dried candy company, Sir Iggy’s Sweets, which would also sell fruit and mocktail kits, she said.

Her mother, Andrea Wollak, used to own Crazy Puppy Gourmet Workshop, a gluten-free fair food truck, which featured mini-donuts, spicy cheese curds and mini-corn dogs.

Aemilia said she came up with the idea of the Krunchy Kimchi Dog after playing around with the possibility of using sauerkraut in a recipe. It took her about a week and a half to create the dish, she said.

Aemilia Wollak’s Krunchy Kimchi Dog. (Courtesy of Aemilia Wollak)

“I’m German, so we have sauerkraut a lot and I like having sauerkraut on hotdogs and brats,” she said. “I was, like, what’s something that is kind of like sauerkraut, but it’s different. We make our own kimchi, and they’re sort of the same, so I wanted to try having kimchi on a hotdog.

“It was really really good, but it needed some texture because it was kind of just a mush, so then I added potato chips and cucumber on top and then I thought it needed a little bit of spice or some sauce so we added spicy mayo on top, and the Krunchy Kimchi Dog was born.”

Ashton Kulesa, an educator for Washington County Extension 4-H and organizer of the event, said each bite of the Krunchy Kimchi Dog “was a roller-coaster ride that fairgoers couldn’t get enough of.” Her creation sold out most days of the Washington County Fair, she said.

The Fair Foodie Challenge judging will take place Feb. 3 at the Washington County Fairgrounds in Baytown Township.

The winners will be announced that day, Kulesa said.

For more information about 4-H, visit extension.umn.edu/minnesota-4-h.

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