Roast. Check. Barbecue. Check. Deep-frying here we come! There were many detractors. Some friends sent safety videos, others cautious words of warning- one even gave statistics on how many fires the fire brigade had to put out every year in November in the deep south. Yes… the deep south of America- the birthplace of fried goodies. They’d fry a whole cow if they could (or have they done that already)?

Now no one can really pin-point who was the first dude crazy enough to dunk a whole gobbler into a pot of boiling oil. It's thought to be cajun, might have started somewhere in Louisiana. There were quite a number of restaurants there that became famous for deep-frying a turkey. How they do it there is by injecting creole-style marinade into their birds and then dropping it into hot peanut or vegetable oil.

"Frying whole turkeys is sort of the Southern version of making fondue. You have a lot of your friends over, you poke around in a pot of hot oil with some sticks, and then you pull out your dinner. Justin Wilson, of Cajun fame, recalls first seeing a turkey fry in Louisiana in the 1930s."---Something Different: Deep-Fried Turkey, Beverly Bundy, St. Louis Dispatch, November 24, 1997 (Food p. 4)

In 1996, Martha Stewart put deep-fried turkey in her magazine and that might have been the nudge this dish needed to go from local obscurity into an overnight phenomenon. Now you can get all sorts of deep-fried paraphernalia from long pots specially catered for the traditionally built bird, to deep frying baskets, hooks, marinade injectors, thermometers not to mention protective clothing and mini fire extinguishers. A deep fried turkey project can set you back about USD200-300!

But enough of that, let's fry the clucker already!

The gear:
A 40-liter pot (can get this at any cooking supplies store, got mine at Kota Damansara)
Portable stove- I just got a simple one with 2 canisters of gas. You can also get one that you can hook up straight to a gas cylinder (in fact, this might be better)
Long pole- broom handle should do it
A metal hook

Bird Prep:
15 liters of oil (we used good old palm oil of course but any oil with a high smoking point is good)
A turkey- we got a 4 kg gobbler- thought we should start with a smaller one so that it’s easier to deep fry
A ball of string, can also get wires but for some odd reason couldn’t find any, so this is the parcel string or butcher string
Meat seasonings

And that’s about it! We also had a small fire extinguisher ready (just in case) and we were told to also get heat resistant gloves. Told my nephew to get it and he came back with white traffic police gloves… well that’s pointless but we discovered it was pretty safe to handle without gloves.



So let the deep frying begin. Part of the puzzle was figuring out how to lower this bird into the hot pot of boiling oil. Since we were unable to find wire, we trussed up the bird nicely- good thing I had chefs at hand to do it and then devised a harness that we were able to hook it on the broom handle. Make sure you measure the distance between submerging the chook and the pole.

We actually had 25 liters of oil ready (my brother exclaimed: you’re deep-frying a person?!) but in the end we used about 12- 13 liters. Measure it first using water. The turkey should be wholly submerged in the oil.

"Deep-fry that clucker!"

Now comes the heating of oil. Most sites said about 30 minutes to heat up oil to right temperature- about 180 I think but this requires a thermometer… err… we couldn’t find one. We could use a meat one but I was afraid it might melt and seemed too much trouble. “Don’t worry, we just test it and agak-agak.” Yeah! Malaysian way, the art of agak-agak”. In the end maybe because our stove was small and the pot big, it took us about an hour to get the oil hot enough. We used the turkey neck dipped in periodically to test the heat. The oil should stop moving in the pot when its hot enough and bubbles well with the neck in. When you take the neck out too, it should be hot not lukewarm to the touch. That’s all I can say about this agak-agak business.

We also needed to change to a fresh canister so be careful here. Lift the pot of boiling oil up and set it aside and you need to use a cloth (or protective gloves if we had any) to change it. Once you set the pot back oil, give it 5 minutes to get it back on the good temperature.

So the turkey has to be patted as dry as you get to avoid spatter and I just rubbed it all over including the cavity with meat rub. This can be salt, pepper, Cajun spices and whatever you like. Now hook the string harness to the hook that is on the pole and gently lower it into the oil- horizontally. It should bubble gloriously not unlike fried chicken in a wok.

Lowering the turkey to Sprach Zarathustra

You can unhook the string and let it loll to the side. We discovered that turkey is actually quite buoyant which made us wonder if we could have put stuffing in. I didn’t want bits of burnt stuffing floating in the oil though. So ever so often we dipped in a ladle and doused the top part with oil. We also turned it a few times.

There were no explosions and it was pretty safe. I figured it’s because the stove is small so the oil never got to dangerous levels. If you are using a bigger stove just be aware of this. Or it might be that palm oil is a pretty stable oil. At any rate we did everything with bare hands and had no need for the fire extinguisher at all!

Turkey and oil become one

Rule of thumb for deep-frying is about 3-4 minutes a pound. So since 4 kg turkey is about 9 pounds, that’s about 36 minutes. Some sites say after this, just leave it in for a further 10 – 15 minutes. Some also say that once the turkey is done it will float to the top but as our turkey was pretty buoyant, this didn’t help. In total we deep-fried it for 45 minutes and lifted out the most ridonkculous crispy deep brown bird. The smell alone was enough to get the neighbours out. Imagine fried chicken fragrance multiplied by 10!

Shake off excess oil and let it sit for a bit in a paper towel covered roasting pan. We carved it after less than minutes- too excited to let it sit plus we’ve been smelling it for the past 40 minutes.

Carve that clucker!

Verdict: It wasn’t oily at all, the hot oil seals in the moisture so what you get is an incredibly moist and succulent bird. It tastes totally different from a roasted or barbecued bird. The skin was crunchy- like keropok and the rub was imbedded deep- superb! There is a fortune to be made by selling bags of this stuff. Also since places like the thighs and wings are not quite white meat, it has a more interesting flavor there. All the sinews fused into crispy goodness- I was happy just digging a jumbo wing.

We didn’t have cranberry sauce but my friend made a sambal hot sauce that went a treat with the turkey. Perhaps because it’s deep fried, it had that fried chook chilli sauce made in heaven taste to it. And that one mini turkey fed all 10 of us well. My nephew even took half the carcass and spent a good half hour just digging into the crevices. This turkey is gold! Only thing is that it’s best eaten piping hot, as hot as your greedy fingers can stand it. That’s when the succulence is at its zenith. A second helping of the breast after it’s stood awhile is not as juicy but still way better than roasted.

Cost: This wasn't a cheap experiment. Big pot RM155, gas stove RM20, 2 canisters of gas RM8, Turkey RM140, Meat rub RM10, String RM3, Oil RM42. Total cost: RM378. But now that we’ve done it once and demystified this fried clucker methinks it’s going to be a Merry Deep-fried Christmas indeed!

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