New York Times food correspondent Kim Severson has covered Thanksgiving from every angle, reporting, with healthy skepticism, on America’s never-ending litany of turkey-cooking fads and fails. Wet brining, dry brining, turkey in a bag, turkey in a T-shirt—the Pulitzer Prize winner has seen, tried, and largely discredited them all.
Deep-frying a turkey may sound like another gastronomic gimmick, but in Severson’s experience, it’s vastly preferable to roasting. “I don’t feel this is stunt food,” she said in a Zoom interview. “From a culinary standpoint, from a deliciousness standpoint, I think the fried turkey is superior. It is so unctuous and delicious and moist. So that’s number one.”
Not only can she persuasively explain why you should deep-fry your Thanksgiving turkey, but she can also lay out a convincing case as to why one fryer in particular, the King Kooker Portable Propane Outdoor Deep Frying/Boiling Package, is the best outdoor turkey deep fryer you can buy.
This sturdy setup comes with everything you need to fry a turkey and more (or do a big seafood boil). And it has a couple nice safety features, such as a shutoff timer and a pronged turkey holder that keeps your bird stable.
It’s the fryer she’s about to use for her third consecutive Thanksgiving, and the one she fried another dozen-ish turkeys in this past summer while researching her piece for NYT Cooking’s Thanksgiving collection.
The King Kooker is also the outdoor deep fryer that was recommended to her by an authoritative source: a former food editor at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, the first major publication to report on deep-frying turkeys (which was originally, and not surprisingly, a Cajun thing) in the 1980s. That editor told Severson that the King Kooker “is the one we all buy and love.”
