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.”