I don't know where this whole "deep-frying a Thanksgiving turkey" thing came from, and I wish it would go back there, but for better or worse, it seems to be what people do now. Mostly worse, and for a couple of reasons.
A, it's a waste of perfectly good cooking oil. Unless you have access to an industrial fryer and an industrial amount of frying oil, you're just dumping bottles of oil into a pot that could otherwise be used to make breads, scones, biscuits, stir-fry, and about a million other things.
B, and here's the big one—you lot never thaw your poultry properly, do you? See, this is where the lack of a proper science and home-econ education has left American society. This is what happens when you funnel all your money into varsity football and new gymnasia. People grow up without learning about the physics of buoyancy, fluid displacement, and chemical reactions. You drop a frozen god-damned turkey into a pot of oil that's only about this far from catching fire on its own and then panic when the ice hits the oil and catches fire and burns your kitchen down like it's The Sims. It doesn't matter what preparation method you plan to use, you must thaw your turkey beforehand. This is not optional. Baking, deep-frying, cooking sous-vide in the hot spring, blasting with an industrial metalworking torch, whatever. Thaw it first.
C, I mentioned buoyancy and displacement. People who are stupid enough to attempt deep-frying their turkey in the first place are often not smart enough to understand fluid displacement. They fill the largest pot they can find with oil up to about 2 inches away from the top because, in their reasoning, this is adequate to submerge the turkey. Well, it's more than adequate by about 120%. The turkey will force most of that oil out of the pot when it enters, because solids cannot occupy the same space as liquids. As mentioned before, due to the ice crystals within the turkey's structure, the oil will now be on fire, so half a pot of flaming cooking oil is now on the floor.
How much brainpower does it really take to just bake the damn turkey in the oven? Maybe don't even bother making a turkey for Thanksgiving. Or, maybe, don't even bother celebrating Thanksgiving. In America, anyway, Thanksgiving is just Landgrab Day, where white evangelicals celebrate taking land away from the Native Americans. Seems to me like a stupid reason to celebrate anything.
--20 November 2023--