10 Foods and Drinks Iowans Grew Up On That Horrify Out-of-Staters

Growing up in Iowa can leave you with food habits that look perfectly normal to you and a little alarming to guests.

Ask Iowans about them, and you may get a shrug or a long defense.

This is what makes out-of-staters raise an eyebrow at a dinner table in Iowa.

Maid-Rite Loose Meat

A Maid-Rite comes as loose ground beef, cooked and spooned straight onto the bun, no patty involved.

Expect a sandwich that sheds crumbles as you eat it.

Old-timers avoid ketchup on a Maid-Rite, one food writer reports.

Younger customers reach for it anyway, and close to 4 in 10 orders at one Newton counter come with ketchup now.

Preference runs generational.

The sandwich traces back to 1926 in Muscatine, when Fred Angell popularized it.

Casey’s Taco Pizza

Casey’s Taco Pizza starts with refried beans and salsa instead of red sauce, then layers on beef or chicken and mozzarella.

Lettuce, tomatoes, taco chips, and cheddar finish it off.

Toppings pile high.

Casey’s lists it right on its pizza menu.

Order one, and you’ll find out how far a pizza can stray from pepperoni.

The chain grew from one Iowa store into more than 2,900 locations across 19 states.

Casey’s Breakfast Pizza

Casey’s also bakes a breakfast pizza, scrambled eggs and sausage over cheese on the same crust.

It’s a pizza you can grab on your way to work.

Pizza for breakfast.

That’s just Tuesday.

If you show up expecting a stack of pancakes, you’ll get a fork-optional egg bake instead.

Pork Chop on a Stick

The Iowa State Fair’s Pork Chop on a Stick is a French-cut rib pork chop weighing 9-11 ounces.

The rib bone stays on to work as the handle.

It’s eaten by hand, one hand on the bone, napkins for the rest.

No fork ever comes with it.

Order one at the fair, and you’ll be eating it on your feet before you find a table.

The Iowa Pork Producers Association introduced the chop at the fair in 1999, and sales were slow at first.

Fair volunteers had a hard time getting fairgoers to buy one that first year, yet the group still sold around 6,000.

More than two decades later, it remains a fair staple.

The tradition holds.

The Bun-Swallowing Tenderloin

The pork tenderloin sandwich comes pounded thin, breaded, and fried well past the edges of its bun.

Travel Iowa’s Tenderloin Trail page singles out Chuckie’s Tenderloin Trucks, a mobile vendor that works stock car races and state fairs, for selling meat “far larger than the bun.”

The Other Place, a neighborhood sports bar in Clive, serves a half-pound cut, meat alone, before the bun even enters the picture.

The meat wins.

You’ll need both hands and a plan for the overflow.

Order fries on the side, and you’ll likely walk out with a box anyway.

The Iowa Chop

Iowa farmers coined the name Iowa Chop in 1976 for a center-cut loin chop more than an inch thick.

Amana Meat Shop sells a bone-in version at three-quarters of a pound, cut 1 to 1.5 inches thick.

That’s well beyond a standard dinner chop.

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) data shows Iowa is the nation’s top hog-producing state, with about $10.9 billion in hog cash receipts in 2022.

A chop that size rarely fits on one plate without spilling over the edge.

One plate isn’t enough.

Splitting one with a friend isn’t a bad plan.

Templeton Rye

Templeton Rye started as Prohibition-era moonshine, cooked up by farmers in the small town of Templeton to get through hard times.

The whiskey earned the nickname “The Good Stuff” and a reputation as Al Capone’s favorite, though that part rests on legend more than any receipt.

The brand relaunched in 2006, and for most of the years since, the rye wasn’t distilled in Iowa at all.

It was distilled in Indiana and bottled in Templeton under the same label.

Not exactly Iowa-made.

For years, the honest answer to where it was made was an awkward one.

Lawsuits over that marketing were settled in 2015.

Templeton opened its Iowa distillery a few years later.

That distillery’s first barrels then needed years to age.

Templeton calls its Single Barrel Rye, released in October 2025, its inaugural rye, distilled, aged, and bottled at the Templeton Distillery.

For most of Templeton Rye’s modern history, in other words, the “authentic Iowa” whiskey on the shelf wasn’t made in Iowa.

Pella’s Dutch Letters

If you look at a Dutch letter from Pella, you’ll see what looks like an oversized almond cookie, shaped into a flaky S and dusted with sugar.

Bite in.

The filling is almond paste.

Jaarsma Bakery and Vander Ploeg Bakery both sell them in the same small town.

Pick a side.

Amana’s Family-Style Meals

Amana Colonies restaurants still serve meals the way the villages did for generations, family-style, with shared side dishes refilled at the table.

That’s the polite version of a much stranger history.

Families in the Colonies didn’t cook meals at home during the communal era, and residents ate at one of more than 50 shared kitchen houses instead.

Dinner was a shared affair.

Sharing was the point.

That system ended with the Great Change of 1932, when residents bought their homes from the Amana Society.

The restaurants’ shared, refillable sides echo it today.

Visit today, and you’ll get the shared sides without your assigned kitchen house down the road.

Wine Without Grapes

Amana Colonies wineries have spent more than 150 years making wine from rhubarb, dandelions, and other fruits, since European grapes wouldn’t grow there.

Village winemakers experimented with what did grow there, and today’s wineries still pour rhubarb, dandelion, and cranberry wines.

If you order a glass on your next stop through the villages, expect fruit wines like rhubarb and dandelion alongside the grape ones.