At Minnesota State Fair, 900 pounds of butter sculpted in homage to Princess Kay finalists
FALCON HEIGHTS, Minn. -- If you visit the Dairy Building at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, you're likely to find more than a cold ice cream treat.
Near the back of the building, Gerry Kulzer is hard at work each day of the fair — in a 40-degree see-through refrigerator — carving the likenesses of 10 young women.
WCCO Live! At the State Fair
Kulzer's task is simple: turn 10 90-pound blocks of butter into the 10 finalists of the Princess Kay of the Milky Way contest.
Each sculpture takes almost an entire day.
"You have to visualize the person in this big block and carve away. You just take away, take away, take away until a nose appears, then the cheeks appear," Kulzer said. "With butter, a subtractive sculpting process."
Now in his third year of butter carving, Kulzer traditionally works with clay. After admiring butter sculptures at the fair from afar, he got his shot and hasn't looked back.
"We have a time limit here. We're sculpting a person a day — and so it goes really fast. And there's not much room for error. So I've got to try to get it right right away," he said.
2023's Princess Kay — Emma Kuball — says it's an honor to be carved.
"I have watched so many people get sculpted out of butter, and it's been my dream for my entire life. So seeing it all come together was such a cool thing," Kuball said. "It means the world to me. I love that there's a legacy on my dairy farm. I love to represent that legacy. I always tell my dad I would never let the cows leave."
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Kuball will eventually get to keep her sculpture, which she says her family plans to divvy up during a town-wide corn roast.
"We're definitely going to start at the back and the base, preserve the face a little bit longer. We're not just going to let people go at it with the corn. There's no way," she said.
