There’s 3 new Craz-E Burgers coming to The Big E

The new Craz-E Burgers — and two new additions — will be standing much taller at the 2024 Big E in West Springfield this year.

The original Craz-E Burger first appeared at The Big E in 2009 and, at the time, was a stand out from standard fried fair food on a stick. It consisted of a bacon cheeseburger on a glazed doughnut.

Over the years it became a fair favorite.

“All the greats have their signature work. McDonalds has the Big Mac. Frank Sinatra had ‘My Way.’ Nickelback has nothing,” MassLive’s Nick O’Malley wrote in 2014. “The Big E? It’s got the Craz-E Burger.”

But the problem with the original Craz-E Burger was the “pretty low-grade burger that you’ll find in your lower tier burger settings: minor league baseball games, movie theaters, from a freezer,” O’Malley wrote.

“My first thought when biting into the Craz-E Burger was ‘Oh man, this is actually really good … wait. What’s up with this burger?’” O’Malley wrote.

That’s one of the big changes coming to the re-imagined Craz-E Burger now at The Emporium in the Better Living Center.

“Literally, we started from scratch,” said E.J. Dean with the Eastern States Exposition’s Better Living Center, adding that they took the original burger and “wanted to make sure that everything had a premium item to it.”

The new burger is an Angus smash burger, which Dean said cooks fast to help keep up with demand but also has “great, exhilarating flavor.”

Instead of cutting the doughnut in half to create the top and bottom buns, the new Craz-E burger features two entire doughnuts as buns.

“One being sweet, one being plain, because we don’t want any one flavor to overpower. We want everything to blend,” Dean said. “That’s the ultimate key to the Craz-E Burger.”

Other additions include bacon and friend onions rings.

“So you get a little crunch, you get the sweet, you get all the different senses all in one big bite,” he said. “That’s what the new Craz-E Burger 2.0 is.”

They also did two new spin-offs.

The first is the spicy burger.

The doughnuts on this Craz-E Burger are rolled in Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. There’s also a fried Jalapeño Popper on the burger.

“Just like the onion ring, you get the crunch and everything, but it just kicks up the heat for those that really like it,” Dean said.

Dean described the heat level as an eight.

“We wanted to keep it spicy so that people would enjoy it, but not so spicy that it scared people away,” he said. “We don’t want to have a bunch of burning mouths walking around the fairgrounds.”

The final Craz-E Bruger version is the Insane Burger, “which is just pure insanity,” Dean said.

It’s got double hamburger, double bacon and is “just a monster of a sandwich.”

It’s made for the ultimate meat and sweets lover.

“It’s breakfast, lunch, dinner. It’s a buffet. It’s dessert,” he said.

The new burgers made O’Malley’s list for the new foods he’s most excited about this year.

“The original Craz-E Burger was one of the first in the recent wave of ‘crazy’ foods at the fair. But with other foods at the fair getting wilder over the years, it became a bit overwhelming in comparison,” he wrote. “So I’m pumped to see that The Big E is putting a fresh spin on one of its signature foods and moving it to a new location.”

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