Thanksgiving is tomorrow. It is a very special holiday to the American and Canadian people that occurs on the fourth Thursday of November. This holiday is representative of iconic American things such as watching football, watching the Macy’s day parade, spending time with family, and eating an excessively large meal until you pass out. The center focus of this meal is turkey. Traditionally, turkey is baked in the oven over the course of four hours for an average weight bird (20-22 lbs.). As of recently, however, there has been an increase in the popularity for deep frying turkey.

The first question I wanted answered when embarking on writing this article was “how unhealthy is deep frying something?” When looking for an answer, I decided to look at a fairly typical fried food. An example of one is fried Oreo. These average around 180 calories per cookie which is around 20 calories more than a regular Oreo. For a tray of five, that adds up to 100 more calories than you would have consumed by just eating five regular Oreos! Despite this, Turkey is not as extreme. A typical deep fried turkey will only have around a 12 calorie difference per serving with an additional 2 grams of fat per serving. While still not as healthy as a baked turkey, the difference is still very subtle. In exchange for the slight increase in calories and fat, the time it takes to cook the turkey is significantly less. It only takes between 3.5 – 4 minutes per pound (about 1 hour and 15 minutes for an average weight bird) which is a lot less time when compared to the 12.5 minutes per pound when baking a turkey (4 hours 30 min for an average bird).

Now probably the most important thing to consider when deciding what manner, you will cook your turkey is how it tastes. Thanksgiving turkey is iconic for its very tasty white meat and its juicy dark meat. These tastes are only amplified when deep frying a turkey with white meat being tastier and dark meat being juicier in addition to gaining a crispy outer layer. This makes deep frying a turkey the superior option when preparing a thanksgiving bird. It is just about as healthy but takes significantly less time to prepare as well as tasting better overall. The only major reasons why you should bake a turkey over deep frying it is if you are nervous about using a frialator or there is a peanut allergy in the family as the oil used in the deep frying process is peanut oil. So what are you waiting for. Go deep fry your thanksgiving turkey!