My family tends to keep it pretty traditional when it comes to Thanksgiving food, but this year we decided to switch things up. Well, sort of. We still made your classic roasted turkey, but we experimented a bit and bought a SECOND turkey to fry. Frying your Thanksgiving turkey has become the new fad over the past few years, so we had to test it out to see what we were missing. If your family is also debating on trying out this new-found technique as opposed to roasting, I have all the deets for you since I was able to get a side-by-side, back-to-back comparison.
I love an old-fashioned roasted turkey. More specifically, my mom’s. This year we purchased our turkey’s fresh off the farm, so that may weigh heavily into my reactions. This year, my mom’s roasted turkey was exceptionally tasty and was not dry at all, setting up a tough competition for the fried one my sister was dealing with. Although in theory it’s faster to fry a turkey, it took us a bit longer as we were unfamiliar with the equipment we were using. Basically, we had a pot full of oil that had to be heated to 350 degrees, but we initially neglected to open a key valve that allows the oil to heat up quicker, so it took a lot longer than expected. Our turkey was about 14 pounds, requiring us to fry every pound for three minutes. So, if we understood the equipment better, this turkey would have taken a lot less longer than our roasted turkey, which takes about three to four hours in the oven.
Once we finally finished preparing everything, we could indulge in this epic taste test. I tried both the fried and roasted turkey back-to-back to see if there was any difference. To be honest, I could not really taste the difference (neither could my mom), but they were both so good! However, the rest of my family could sense the two apart from each other, ranking the fried turkey number one because it was deemed more flavorful. It was most definitely super yummy, I just could not separate the roasted versus the fried from each other if I’m being quite honest.
Frying a turkey was super fun and proved to be quite entertaining for my family. I say if you’re interested in experimenting with your Thanksgiving meal, you should totally try frying a turkey, especially because it is a lot easier and less time consuming, but also make sure that you are safe and have the proper equipment to execute it. We decided that we will be having both roasted and fried turkey next year as well, so maybe this will be a new Thanksgiving tradition for my family. It may have the same effect on yours too!