Thanksgiving Turkey, Southern Style: Butterball Indoor Electric Turkey Fryer

My childhood memories of Thanksgiving include parades, football, and the seemingly endless wait for the turkey to come out of the oven.  Roasted turkey is pretty good when it's smothered in gravy and accompanied by cranberry dressing, stuffing, and all the other goodies that Turkey Day entails, but without all those extras it's a little lacking.  Enter fried turkey.

Unlike oven-roasting, which takes about four and a half hours for a 12-pound turkey, deep frying your turkey takes about 4 minutes per pound, meaning that the turkey is done in less than an hour.  Better yet, instead of dry meat, you are left with a moist turkey and delicious, golden-fried skin.

I was lucky enough to try out* the Butterball Electric Turkey Fryer for a pre-Thanksgiving fried turkey rehearsal.  Unfortunately, the camera ate my pics of the finished product, but I was really impressed by how simple and easy it was to use.  Simply fill the fryer with about two gallons of peanut oil, pre-heat the oil for about a half-hour (the fryer lets you know when it's ready), and put the turkey--in its metal basket--into the fryer.  Just make sure that your turkey is completely thawed before frying unless you want to end up on the local news.

I was very impressed with how thoughtfully designed the fryer is.  Manufactured by our friends at Masterbuilt, who previously let us take one of their awesome Electric Smokehouses on a test drive, the Butterball Fryer is meant to be used indoors -- I set it up on the kitchen island. The lid keeps splatter contained while letting steam escape.  Once the turkey is done cooking, you can lift the basket and attach it to the rim of the fryer above the oil vat so that the turkey can drain and cool without leaving an oily mess behind. Afterward, the drain valve simplified clean-up and made it easy to save the oil for another day (oil has about six hours of cooking life in it - that's a lot of turkeys).

If you're on the fence about trying a fried turkey, I say just go for it.  It's simple, hard to screw up, and way faster than oven roasting.  Best of all, it's decidedly better tasting!

You can get the Butterball Electric Turkey Fryer XL (which accommodates up to a 20 lb turkey) in time for Christmas at Amazon. Check Costco or your local supermarket for large containers of peanut oil, and don't forget the marinade injector.  Happy Thanksgiving!

*Thank you to the folks at Masterbuilt for providing the fryer used in this article.  While the fryer was free, my enthusiasm is 100% real!

Kitchen Gear Video Review: Happy Moon Chef's Knife

Want to buy one for yourself? You can snag a Happy Moon Chef's Knife on Amazon. 

We were provided this item free of charge in exchange for a review. All opinions are our own and we promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Essential Gear: AYL Silicone Cooking Gloves

AYL, which I learned stands for "Accessorize Your Life," was kind enough to send us* a pair of their wildly popular silicone cooking gloves to put through their paces. While silicone cooking gloves have been around for a while, AYL's gloves have a new trick up their sleeve--or up their glove, if you want to get technical. Instead of sticky, sweat-inducing silicone on the inside as well, the AYL gloves have a soft, heat-resistant cotton liner, which not only feels better on your hands but improves your grip as your fingers don't slide around inside the gloves.

I used the AYL gloves while cutting corn kernels off hot cobs and moving racks of baby back ribs from the smoker to the grill, and they were great! Gloves help you retain the dexterity needed to handle knives, tongs, or whatever your cooking weapon of choice, and with free fingers and the gloves' textured surface, I found it easy to keep the corn cobs steady while I carefully freed them of their kernels. And because the gloves are silicone, they don't get saturated when handling wet foods. Cleaning barbeque sauce off was easy with a soapy brush (just take care not to get water inside the glove while cleaning).

For a going rate of $18 on Amazon, the AYL Silicone Cooking Gloves are a no-brainer and a must-have in anyone's kitchen.

Get your set of AYL Silicone Cooking Gloves from Amazon: AYL Silicone Cooking Gloves

*We always strive to provide you with an objective, unbiased review, even when items are provided to us free of charge.

Review: NutriCrystal Wireless Smart Food Scale

I'm a big advocate of having a food scale in your kitchen. Our ability to estimate how much we are eating tends to be terrible and I find my estimated size of a serving is inversely proportional to how hungry I am). So if you want to eat the right serving sizes, the only way forward is to actually weigh your food.

The NutriCrystal Wireless Smart Food Scale takes this to the next level. Not only can you weigh your food, but you can wirelessly connect it to your Droid/iPhone to actually get a read out on the nutritional value of what you're eating.

This scale would be a dream for calorie or carb-counting dieters, diabetics or athletes. Thank goodness, I am none of those things at  the moment, so I'm happy with just knowing the serving sizes. Still, this is a pretty cool functionality. First you get the app on your phone and set up a bluetooth link to the scale. Then you simply put the item on the scale and enter on your phone what it is, and you get a read out with full nutritional information.


So here are the pros and cons of this new tool:

Pros:

• Very cool ability to link to your phone (which is where we keep all of our most important info these days, right?) so you can keep track of your diet over the course of time and access it anywhere.
• Helpful for calorie counting or even just figuring out how good or bad something is for us.
• Sleek looking and comes in a variety of colors, so you won't mind having it on your kitchen counter.
• Even if you're not interested in nutritional values, being able to weight your food is super helpful in getting portion sizes right or making sure you have the right amount of an ingredient when precision matters, such as in baking. 
• A cool potential application for this is if you're creating your own recipes to share, this would be a great way to offer nutritional information.

Cons:

• I don't like that you have to press a button on the back of the scale to switch units of measurement. It's a pain to flip it over, and mine seems to keep defaulting back to ml, so I have to do it over and over. You can change the unit on your phone more easily, but what about when I just want to weigh something quickly and not mess with the app?
• Like all new technologies there are some growing pains with the app. Expect this to get better with time.

At $69.95, this scale is priced a bit high for someone who just wants to know weights, but it seems reasonable if you need help gathering full nutritional information. Buy yours here.

I received one or more of the products mentioned above for free using Tomoson.com. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I use personally and believe will be good for my readers.