Thanksgiving has a reputation for endless brining methods, divisive side dishes, and argumentative relatives. It’s no wonder hosting can be stressful. Unless you’ve got The Right Stuffing, that is. This series is devoted to all things related to the Thanksgiving meal, and it will help you create dishes that appear on your table year after year—even if it can't help you manage your relatives.
If there is one enduring takeaway I have from reading every “How to Deep Fry Your Turkey” recipe, from 47 years of Thanksgivings, and 20 years as a Red Cross volunteer, it’s this: Do not deep fry your turkey; just put it in the damn oven. For the record, I do have a very large gas ceramics kiln in my driveway. I weld; I started blowing glass at fifteen. I like fire just fine. But put hot oil, large frozen birds, flammable landscaping, and drunk humans with skin together and nothing good happens, in my experience. Still, the assignment was “how to safely deep fry a turkey,” and while I posit there is really no good reason or way to do so, the safest way to ignore my advice and do it anyway, is in an electric fryer, inside.
Introducing the Turk ‘n’ Surf
First, you’re going to need to assemble your tools and ingredients. I was lucky enough to benefit from a local kitchen library that loaned me the Masterbuilt Turk ‘n’ Surf turkey fryer/seafood boiler. You can find a wealth of electric turkey fryers on Amazon, and they will cost you only marginally more than the oil you need to fill said fryer. I bought three gallons of peanut oil for $64 and then a petite eleven-pound gobbler. This fryer topped out at fourteen pounds, but more recent models will accommodate up to twenty-pound turkeys. You’ll also need whatever brine or dry rub ingredients you’ll want to use, heat-proof oven mitts, and a thermometer for the turkey. Double-check that you know where your fire extinguisher is, and that it is still functional.
Some basic rules of turkey-frying physics
Before we get into it, we have to lay a foundation of common understanding of fact: when water meets oil, it spatters. When ice meets oil, it explodes. 400-degree oil will melt your plastic furniture, kids toys, play structures and children. It will light your landscaping on fire. The primary goal is keep the oil in the pot, with no reason for it to leave the pot while it is boiling hot, whether through displacement or repelling water.
Oil + water = hospital (and ice = water)
Oil + plastic = fire truck
Propane + grass/wood chips/trees/leaves/patio furniture = insurance claim
Propane + hot tubs/playground sets/play pools = denied insurance claim
Fire + oil + children/pets/wild animals = CPS/vet bill/police
Drunk people never remember how the displacement method works (Fill a bathtub, it won’t overflow. Get into that bathtub, it’s now overflowing.)
Flavorize the fowl
There are varying ideas about how to prep a turkey (I prefer Kenji’s osmosis by salt, myself). Former Lifehacker senior food editor Claire Lower suggested I just “dry rub the thing," but I was surprised by how many recipes suggested brining, since that is introducing liquid to the equation (which is bad because of the above-stated Rule #1). But I'm a curious person, and this was my first time deep frying, so I decided to test it out of curiosity: Could I really dry the turkey out after the brine, and would the brine really add anything to the taste? I'd also read that you can tell how much oil you'll need by putting the turkey into the fryer and filling the pot with water and then measuring the water. Why not just do that with the brine? So I prepared 2 cups of citrus juice from grapefruit, lemon, lime, and orange, along with one cup of salt, 3 tablespoons of peppercorn, a whole head of garlic, an onion, and 2 cups of celery, along with 1 cup of white wine and a tablespoon of chicken-flavored Better Than Bouillon, and boiled it in three gallons of water. Then I let it cool and poured it right into the fryer. I cleaned the turkey, which was still slightly frozen at this point, removing the plastic hanger by the legs, the pop-up thermometer, the neck, and the package of giblets, which was hidden under the neck flap. (Always check under the neck flap.)
I let the turkey hang out, covered, outside in the fryer all night since it was under 40 degrees, but if you live in warmer climates or your local wildlife has developed opposable thumbs, inside is fine, with some ice to keep the temperature under 40°F. I let the turkey chill for eight hours and then carefully pulled out the basket with the turkey in it, and looked at the waterline in the fryer.
Brining in the fryer is a real baller move
Even if you’re going to completely ignore me and deep fry outside over propane in a pot, you should still brine in that pot, though it clearly means we don’t have an established trust between us. Still, once you remove the turkey from the brine, you now know exactly how much oil you need to cover the bird, eh? It seems smart now because you’re not drunk yet. All you really need to do now is dump out the brine and dry the pot. (Why bother washing it, when you’re about to heat oil to 350-400°F in it?)
Light it up
Consider placement of the fryer in your kitchen. Ideally, it’s below your hood or near a window. I did both, by aiming a fan at the fryer to blow the smoke out the window and stationing it under the exhaust fan. Meanwhile, it’s time to add oil to the completely, totally, 100% dry turkey fryer, to the fill line. Now remember, we also know how much is needed to cover the turkey. If the fill line is more than you need, don’t go all the way. If the fill line is below where you need… well, we have a problem. You want the whole bird under oil, so think back: Was the bird really well-seated in the brine? Horizontal and in the basket as well as possible? Is the turkey under the weight limit? You want to be sure you’re not overfilling the electric fryer, either. But assuming math is mathing, you should be good. So dump your oil in (in my experience, three gallons is about right and also...such a waste) and turn the fryer on. If the math is not mathing, it’s time to get out a roasting pan and go to plan B.
The fryer should be adjusted to 400°F, even though we’re going to fry around 350°F. Your fryer may not achieve the 400 degrees, and you can always adjust it, so let's just start by trying to get it hot.
The only time you want the words “dry” and “turkey” together
Rule #1 is Rule #1 for a reason: No matter how you flavorize this bird, you need to get it as dry as possible before it goes into the oil. That’s inside and out. Use paper towels to give you a head start, but then place the bird in front of a fan, and let it blow dry, flipping it around every 15 minutes as the oil heats up. At some point, you want to make sure you are aiming the air inside the cavity so you dry that out, too. I cannot overstate this: Any ice on the bird is inherently dangerous, and inside the bird is the last place that ice defrosts. Double check. Some people refrigerate the bird, uncovered, overnight to really get it dry, but I don’t have the fridge space or will to do that.
You dry it out for a second reason, which is crispy skin. It can’t get crisp with the skin soggy.
The oil should take about an hour to heat, at which point you should check it with a thermometer. Now, obviously, I shouldn’t need to mention that this is boiling hot oil and you are not made of metal. Wear heat resistant gloves. Use a long enough thermometer that you’re not close to the oil. If you’ve gotten it to 400°F, congratulations; now turn it down to 350°F. If it’s at 350, we’re good to go.
Read these instructions at least four times
At this point, I felt bad for the bird, being so nude, so I took some dry garlic and chili rub and slathered it on. Put the super dry turkey in the basket, horizontally, breast side up, and nestle it in as low as it’ll go. Take the lid off the fryer, and use the hanger that your fryer came with to hold the basket and slowly lower it into the pot. Remember, you probably have to align the basket to a notch or something in the fryer, so look ahead of time. When I say lower slowly, consider that it should take 20-30 seconds to lower it all the way in. The oil will react immediately, so you should slowly allow it to fill the cavity of the turkey, then submerge it, and finally, release the handle from the hanger.
At this point, you have two options. Cover the pot or don’t cover it. I’d read that covering the pot meant you were trapping steam in, which would lead to less crispy turkey, but this made no sense to me since the turkey is ensconced in oil (not air) the whole time. While you might get condensation on the lid of the pot, which causes those droplets to fall back into the oil, (thus causing less crispness), I preferred not to risk the safety of my home, dog, and pride, so I covered the pot. The basic math is that it should take 3-1/2 minutes per pound, which put me at 40ish minutes. However, many recipes suggested you remove the turkey when the breast hit 145°F , not the FDA recommended 165°F, as it would continue to climb after being removed. Made sense to me.
I was kind of delighted that, about mid way through cook time, I started to smell a little citrus and pepper, which made me think the bird would turn out OK.
About thirty minutes in, the breast registered 145°F, and it was time to come out. I was not excited for this process. You need to consider where you’ll put the basket with the turkey, and remember: You don’t want oil going down your sink. So I stuffed some paper towels into the sink, and with both gloves and the hook, very slowly extracted the basket, allowing the oil to drain out as I lifted it. I tilted the basket to let it fully drain out of the turkey, then moved it the three feet to the sink.
From there, I let the turkey rest for fifteen minutes, and considered how to move it to the cutting board. I tried to gently lift it out a few times, but concluded that dumping it out was my best bet. It immediately broke into the legs and breast, which I took as a good sign it was done. The skin was not crispy, despite all efforts otherwise. Research shows this is a common problem solved by the solutions offered before—drying the bird really well and leaving the lid off. I took the “L”.
The finished result
I shaved off some white and dark meat and took a taste. Here’s the thing, folks: I don’t love turkey the way some people do. But when it’s done right, in the first hour after it’s out of the oven, turkey is moist and silky and delicious. Except when you deep fry it. This was tasteless and tough and dry. So much so I took another temperature reading, still just 160°F in the breast. It had retained zero taste from either the brine or the dry rub. I’d have preferred Colonel Sanders, and you don’t have to figure out how to get rid of three gallons of oil when you go with KFC. It wasn’t the worst turkey ever: My almost mother-in-law believed in throwing unseasoned turkeys into the oven and spraying them with Pam once every few hours. But my bar is, as you now understand, low.
Call me a snob, but I demand more of my fowl.
How to clean up after deep-frying
What I wish I’d done instead was think of every other possible thing I could deep fry while the oil was hot, to take advantage. Broccoli! Potatoes! Garlic! Twinkies! Anything to make use of this oil I’d bought for this singular use. Instead I just let it cool, like a total fool; then, using a funnel, I carefully and slowly poured it right back into the bottle it came in, and then dropped that bottle off at a cooking oil recycler in my area.
Wipe the interior chamber of your fryer squeaky dry with paper towels and store in the box, if possible. Then take that box to the edge of a cliff and kick it off, and make an oven-roasted bird next year.