Frying turkeys is not exactly avant garde these days, but it wasn’t until fifteen or twenty years ago that home cooks starting messing with it. It seems obvious that this process started in hunting camps where there is likely to be some source of heat and a large pot, but not much in the way of an oven and quite often no expertise atallatall. Lots of things can be fried and many outdoors types like fried food. Because Why? Probably because it’s bad for you and gives you indigestion and gas when done poorly. I don’t know why, it’s just a fact.

    Today you can buy a turkey frying apparatus in most hardware and outdoor sporting goods stores and some can be right slick, but then you will have a large and mostly unused piece of equipment to sit next to the bread machine, the slow cooker, the indoor rotisserie, the Nordic Track and those other things that you wouldn’t want to be without but somehow don’t use very often. A device designed primarily to fry turkeys from Cabela’s, say, can do other things, but mostly it’s just a big deep fryer.

    A very serviceable fryer can be fashioned from a propane burner, a metal milk carton and a great big pot. Oil and heat are critical so it’s a good idea to have a thermometer with a long sensor on it to tell you when the oil is hot enough. There are other less technical ways, but lets use the thermometer.

    The first time I fried a whole turkey was twenty some odd years ago because some cousins had been somewhere and seen it done and reported that it was great way to cook a turkey, "that "It tasted great, moist, and it's easy to do". I thought frankly that it was the dumbest, most ridiculous thing that one could do to a turkey. I had never had any and had never seen it done, but my mother, whose taste could be trusted, said that a nephew had done one recently and it was pretty good.

    “How’s he do it?”, I asked. “.. in  a great big pot of oil over a propane burner.. It splashes some – be careful… don’t do it inside.”  I later found out that said nephew had only done the breast. I didn’t know that at the time, however, and thought it might be a process worth trying what with all my Southern breathren going on and on about it - and so I went to see Peter Chang at Bowery Restaurant Supply for a big enough pot to hold a whole turkey and the necessary oil. I still have the pot and use it from time to time to make frys and BIG boils like Beaufort Stew.

    Somewhere I found a large gas ring that could be run on bottled gas and got 35 pounds of peanut oil from a big box store and went to work.

    I seasoned the bird and - my turkey frying instructions being really vague - thought through a way to get the turkey into and out of the hot oil. I sort of dried the cavity and rigged the bird on a piece of stainless-steel wire with a pair of 1” dowels at each end in a sort of flexible ‘I’ beam and heated the oil  -  to 375 degrees as most frying instructions tell you - and put the turkey in, breast end down.

    KA-BOOM about describes what happened next. Oil, hot way beyond the boiling point of water,  rushed into the cavity through the neck hole, hit the little remaining moisture in that confined space and expanded like rocket fuel out the open end of the diving bird. It’s hard to get out of the way of spurting oil when you aren’t expecting it and I didn’t entirely. I abandoned the turkey in my retreat and then all hell broke loose with oil blowing out over the edges of the huge pot and hitting the pavement all around the cooker. It put out the burner and permanently stained the driveway and the whole thing kept spitting and roiling away, oil flying in a cone shape for feet around the cooker.

   “Don’t do it inside…” Well, no kidding.

    I won't. 

   We live and learn. So. I am here to tell you that the most important thing to remember when you decide to fry a turkey is really dry the inside - REALLY, DRY the INSIDE - and don’t hurry the immersion. Take your time lowering the assembly into the oil. Go as slowly as you can so that the moisture boils off as the bird goes in. Oil will still likely shoot out and bubble up over the top a bit when the turkey is all the way in, but it won’t be the frightening, mediaeval experience of sudden immersion.

    You need a large pot for this, too, but it doesn’t have to be pot specifically for frying. I have one, but I use the old one more often as it works better for me.