Deep-Fried Turkey, Part I

Nowadays, more and more families are opting to make a deep-fried turkey the pièce de résistance on their dining tables at Thanksgiving. Last Thanksgiving, I hoped to join this movement, but it can be very dangerous without the right equipment. Numerous video abound on YouTube illustrating these dangers. In fact, when you type in "deep fried turkey" at YouTube, they automatically suggest adding "blowing up", "explosion", "fire", "gone wrong", "accident", and "disaster" to the search.

Luckily, the growing popularity of my blog has opened some new doors for me. I was contacted recently by a large Internet retailer and given a chance to get a large discount on a product of theirs if I review it for them on my site (and provide some advertising, which you may have already noticed). I immediately searched over the deep frying equipment they offered, and found this very affordable beauty. I haven't ordered it yet, but it looks like it is a good size and has all the tools I need to finally deep fry a turkey.

Since I haven't done it yet, I won't claim to be an expert, but the consensus seems to be that you should never try to deep fry a turkey indoors (hence the outdoor turkey fryer). You also need to have the right sized pot for the turkey and the right amount of oil. And, most importantly, the turkey needs to be completely thawed and dried off. If you leave any water or ice on or in the turkey, it will boil pretty much instantly and the expanding water will push the oil up over the sides to overflow, burning anyone nearby and/or igniting into a ball of fire when it hits the heat source.

Here's what it looks like when you do it correctly.

My goal for the review post will be to not only deep fry a turkey, but also to deep fry a bunch of the traditional Thanksgiving side dishes as well. I think deep-fried stuffing would be great, and deep-fried mashed potatoes should be absolutely divine. I wonder if I can deep fry gravy? That seems a little excessive. . . but that's probably what doubters said about deep-fried butter and deep-fried beer — both of which have debuted to considerable acclaim at recent Texas State Fairs. I'd also like to deep fry cranberry sauce, one of my favorite Thanksgiving sides, and, of course, prepare some deep-fried pumpkin pie for dessert. I'll probably have to invite a lot of people over to help me eat all this.

That will be my short-term goal; hopefully, I'll complete all this before Thanksgiving, so I can have a post written and available for anyone to reference while deep frying with their families over the holiday. And farther down the road, a long-term goal will be to one day prepare a turducken and deep fry it. . .



OK, fine, since I didn't actually fry anything this post, here's some YouTube clips of turkey fryers exploding:

The fire extinguisher is less than effective.

The child running around freely in the background made me very nervous at first.

This one almost looks like a mushroom cloud.

Why would you fry this close to your couch?

Actually, most of the really good turkey fryer explosions I found on YouTube were made on purpose. That's probably a good thing.