"Ken Fortenberry" wrote in message
gy.com...
Mike Connor wrote:
...
No sensible person has a deep fryer of sufficient capacity for any
reasonable turkey,

But of course you knew that anyway, ...

Well of course *I* know that, but some clever redneck somewhere
discovered that deep frying a turkey was the perfect excuse to
stand around in the driveway drinking beer while the womenfolk
did the real work in the kitchen.

I don't have a deep fryer big enough to do a turkey. Several of my friends
and acquaintances do. Some of them are rednecks.....others are anything
but. Some of them are women. Given that the apparatus is typically used
once or twice a year, there is some merit to the argument that they are not
practical investment....but the same is true for a lot of kitchen
gear.....or fly rods, for that matter.

As for the observation that the men stand in the driveway drinking beer
while the women do the real work in the kitchen, in households where this is
likely to result, that's pretty much the way it would fall out anyway. Ever
known anybody who owns a grill?

Naturally this has become very
popular here in the States even though the finished product is
so bland and tasteless that many use syringes and other silly
things to INJECT flavor into the turkey. I swear to god I am NOT
making this up.

Good cooks and bad used syringes for decades before deep frying turkeys (not
as new a phenomenon as we are here led to believe) became popular. It's a
good and perfectly acceptable method for seasoning and moisturinzing large
pieces of meat. And most turkeys sold in grocery stores in the U.S. have
already been injected with water and sundry flavorings and chemicals anyway,
as is also true of hams and various other meats. That said, a deep fryed
turkey is no more tasteless or bland than is deep fryed chicken, a perennial
favorite, and not without reason. Deep frying in very hot oil is an
excellent way to cook meats quickly and thoroughly without drying them, as
has been known by decent cooks the world over for centuries.

The only valid criticisms of deep frying (apart from matters of personal
taste) center on health concerns; there can be no doubt that the method adds
fat to whatever is being cooked. A large part of the problem is that it's
comparatively difficult to season foods prior to deep frying.....anything
simply sprinkled or rubbed on will fall off immediately when the food goes
into the oil. The standard solution is to include the seasonings in
breading or a batter of some kind and then coat the food with this mixture.
Breading and batters are very absorbant; they soak up a lot of fat. Keeping
this in mind, whole birds are ideal candidates for deep frying because they
can be cooked with the skin on after seasonings like fresh herbs have been
manually forced under the skin. The vast majority of the oil drains off
while resting the meat after cooking and during slicing. Naturally, the
deminishing ratio of surface to mass as size increases means that bigger
pieces of meat will carry with them less fat per unit mass, thus making
turkeys a particularly good choice for deep frying.

All you need to know about deep frying a turkey is that you
cannot buy a turkey fryer from a cooking or culinary catalog but
Cabela's sells a TON of them.

Well, it also helps to know that "all you need to know" about anything is a
red flag worth paying attention to. I suspect that culinary catalogs don't
list such items (if indeed this is true) for the same reasons that kitchen
specialty shops don't stock them. It probably has more to do with return
per unit of storage or display space and demand than anything else. Bottom
line is Bubba and Buffy have different tastes, budgets, and prejudices.
Myself, I've had more superb meals in the basements of southern Baptist
churches than in four star restaurants....or my own kitchen, for that
matter.

Wolfgang