Not exactly, despite the claim of this post:
Deep frying is a form of convection heating. Instead of hot air, you are using hot oil to transfer the heat. Depending on the oil used in the fryer, the temperature is usually about 375 degrees to keep the food from absorbing a lot of oil.
The Big Easy uses infrared energy to "bathe" food. It excites the proteins, not the water. Thus, you are literally frying it. It's just like sitting in the sun all day. The infrared energy will "fry" your meat's skin. The Big Easy doesn't need a lid because it's better to let the hot air escape. That way your food doesn't dry out and there's no basting necessary. Unlike conventional turkey fryers there is also no warm-up period. Just drop your thawed turkey (stuffed or unstuffed, injected or not, sugar-less rubbed or not) into the chamber and turn the Big Easy on. Infrared energy starts cooking it immediately and the cooking time for 12-14-pound turkey will be cut almost in half.
Without expressing an opinion on the relative merits of cooking a turkey this way, it's not equivalent to deep-fat frying. As it says, it only radiates the skin, whereas a deep fryer gets hot oil inside the bird as well, which has to speed up the cooking time considerably. And if the oil is sufficiently hot, there's no reason that it has to make the bird greasy, or any more so than it would be naturally from its own fat.
The Big Easy
™ is $165 at Amazon, whereas serviceable friers are available for less than half the price. Of course, with the former, you don't need any oil, which might save you ten bucks or so per turkey preparation, so it might pay for itself over time if you do a lot of turkeys. But considering the time value of money, I think that you'd have to be a real turkey fan to make up the difference. Of course, it might be good for other meats as well.
[Update late evening]
Contrary to Glenn's comment, I don't call "foul." The proper spelling is "fowl."
I saw that, and I'm kinda curious about it.
How does it generate IR radiation without, say, transferring heat by convection or conduction? And does that mean that it simply wastes the energy that would normally be imparted by those methods? If so, how much less efficient (read: extra fuel) is the process (or does the lack of oil more than make up for the extra fuel)?
I assume that the attraction of this method is that it cooks from the surface inward, just as convection/conduction, rather than from the interior, as microwaves zipping through skin to hit water molecules, thereby denaturing the surface proteins and giving it that nice "cooked" taste (yes, I watch too much AB)... is that remotely correct? And if so, it makes me wonder... how hard would it be to make, say, a LED in IR wavelengths and combine that with a microwave to cook inside and out at the same time with less power?
I'm a long time turkey fryer. We do several throughout the year for various reasons. Sometimes we do one JUST because it sounds good. I've never found a bird that comes out better. We do a 14 to 16 pounder in about
an hour. That's way less than half the time for a bird that size.
There's nothing I read there that makes me think it would top the old fashioned way I'm doing it now. And there's no way you'd get the taste either.
The real test is, would you give up your french fries, for potatoes done this way?
Maybe I'm missing something here, but how does leaving the lid off to let the hot air escape a) not prolong the cooking process and b) not cause the turkey to dry out?
Interesting to think of oil frying as a convective process - guess I never bothered to apply what I learned in Heat Transfer to the kitchen. Makes me wonder what other engineering applications are lurking in the Betty Crocker cookbook, disguised as recipes and cooking instructions.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but how does leaving the lid off to let the hot air escape a) not prolong the cooking process and b) not cause the turkey to dry out?
Maybe the fact that the poster understands nothing about basic physics?
While this convection thing sounds kind of ridiculous, you're way underestimating the cost of deep-frying a turkey. A twelve-to-fourteen pound bird takes a little less than four gallons of peanut oil to do properly, which works out to a little less than forty dollars. Now you can theoretically reuse the oil if you deep-fry regularly, but I'll admit I deep-fry precisely once a year, at Thanksgiving, and never have a chance to reuse. I basically budget the oil to cost twice what the turkey does.
But my god does it make an amazing bird.
Dave,
doesn't anyone at your house have a birthday? Where do you live? We have numerous holidays that get fried turkey AND hot dogs, hamburgers, etc. I found that the person who says,
"FRIED TURKEY?! FOR THE 4TH OF JULY?!?"
is usually the first one at the turkey plate, then puts two hot dogs, fully dressed. along side that beautiful meat. As the old commercial said,
'Try it, you'll like it"
but I doubt you'll need the Alka-Seltzer. Doing this, I usually get 3 to 4 events out of my oil. That brings down the cost.
Big D:
Some part of the cooker (probably the inner wall, but maybe that scaffold that holds the turkey or something else I didn't see in the picture) is heated such that it emits infrared at a wavelength (hopefully) optimized for absorption by turkey skin, but for which air is relatively transparent. It doesn't heat the air, which then heats the turkey, but is shining infrared light directly on the turkey. You could evacuate the air from the cooker and still heat the turkey with an infrared heater.
Big D:
The inner wall of the cooker is heated such that it emits infrared at a wavelength (hopefully) optimized for absorption by turkey skin, but for which air is relatively transparent. It doesn't heat the air, which then heats the turkey, but is shining infrared light directly on the turkey. You could evacuate the air from the cooker and still heat the turkey with an infrared heater.
My family always ate a lot of turkey also. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, and whenever mom felt it was a good idea (I think she feels it's a good way to feed a lot of people, like her four sons). Hell, last Christmas Dad fried a turkey, Mom baked a turkey, and I smoked a duck.
Jethro,
isn't it kind of hard to keep them lit?
Perhaps the good Professor Reynolds is making a pun. You're calling "foul" on the premise that cooking a turkey in The Big Easy is the same as cooking a turkey in a deep fat fryer. Foul and fowl being homophones.
Or would it be a pun be if Glenn had said, "Rand Simberg calls fowl."
err... I think that Rand is aware of that. He's the one who made the pun, not Glenn (who prefers puppies to turkey any day of the week).
We need someone with a FLIR that can record some footage of this thing's heat scale and distribution.
Big D wrote:"how hard would it be to make, say, a LED in IR wavelengths and combine that with a microwave to cook inside and out at the same time with less power?
Not so much a dioge but they already do. Like convection ovens with electric infrared broiler burners. Or a convection/microwave oven that can blast the holy out of something and used in restaurants a lot. They even make grills with infrared burners now, really meant for thinner strips of meat though. Those get a blazing sear on something within minutes.
My oven has a broiler/roast option that cycles the broiler elements and bottom roaster element back and forth while blasting the convection fan over the food. This will cook a beer butt chicken nicely but will probably leave a big roaster raw in the middle while the outside is done.
Big D wrote:"how hard would it be to make, say, a LED in IR wavelengths and combine that with a microwave to cook inside and out at the same time with less power?
Very hard, because you're operating on a misconception. Microwaves cook food from the outside in, just like infrared. The idea that microwaves cook food "from the inside out" is an urban legend.
"The inner wall of the cooker is heated such that it emits infrared at a wavelength (hopefully) optimized for absorption by turkey skin, but for which air is relatively transparent. It doesn't heat the air, which then heats the turkey, but is shining infrared light directly on the turkey."
This is somehow different from the infrared that is emitted by the electric element in my oven and bounces around hitting the food and the walls of the oven which then re-radiate that infrared back on the food, etc? Right
Has anyone been to the appliance store and noticed ovens that heat using quartz lamps on the roof of the oven? Yep, "infrared". It's amazing stuff, also known as "heat".
"This is somehow different from the infrared that is emitted by the electric element in my oven and bounces around hitting the food and the walls of the oven which then re-radiate that infrared back on the food, etc? Right"
Sarcasm notes, but no it isn't. When you set you oven to broil you're supposed to put the food nearer to the heating element to accomplish much the same thing. When you just cook meat normally in the oven your roasting, which relies on heating the air to cook evenly.
And to clarify, I'm not trying to defend the device, just explaining how infrared works, as opposed to convection or conduction.
@S.M. Artass
"Jethro,
isn't it kind of hard to keep them lit?"
Heh. To be perfectly honest I hadn't looked at the thing enough to realize it's propane. I thought one plugged it in. But if one had his heart set on propane, let's propose that you evacuate the inner shell and apply heat from propane to that.