With American Thanksgiving around the corner, I need to call out one of the dumbest cooking trends the internet has ever promoted: deep-frying turkeys. It is time to stop!
This big bad idea began back in the late 1970s. Southern chefs in New Orleans, who normally fried chickens, decided to apply their technique to a different bird five times the size.
As time went by, celebrity cooks like Martha Stewart and Emeril Lagasse took the scheme to their television shows, adding to the lore.
But it was YouTube – making the world ever more stupid – that really elevated this sizzling shenanigan to epic proportions. The concept of cooking a large turkey in a fraction of the oven time, not to mention the redneck spectacle of a pot of hot oil, a wrecking ball of a fowl, and the ever imminent danger of this combustible combination spilling and splattering into a backyard fireball, was just too irresistible not to click.
A full-size turkey frying in peanut oil. Photo: Getty Images
Some culinary proponents argue that deep-frying makes the bird crispier and more tender. I am not so sure. Turkey has so little fat that the skin is likely to be brittle, not crunchy. The one time I tasted a fried turkey, the breast meat was as dry as a manila envelope.
Dining and Cooking