The Best Masterbuilt Electric Turkey Fryer

Search for an indoor electric turkey fryer and you will find machines badged Masterbuilt and machines badged Butterball, often on the same retailer page at different prices, and it looks like a brand decision. It is not. Masterbuilt builds the Butterball-badged fryers under license; Butterball is a turkey company lending its name.

What follows from that is useful. The safety design, the porcelain-coated inner pot, the oil-reduction claim and the basic build are shared across the range. So you are not trading one company’s engineering against another’s — you are choosing capacity, controls and how many jobs the machine does.

If you want that decision framed as a straight head-to-head between the two best-known models, that is on Masterbuilt vs Butterball. This page is the wider question of which model in the lineup.

The full method behind every pick is set out on how we pick. For a single-brand lineup the useful criteria are the ones that actually differ between models:

• Maximum bird weight, against the bird you will really buy rather than the largest the box allows.
• How much the machine decides. A digital thermostat and timer remove the two most common first-time errors.
• Oil volume, because oil is the biggest consumable in frying and indoor electrics are chosen partly to reduce it.
• Whether it does anything the other 364 days.
• Electrical draw, which decides whether it can share a circuit with everything else running that afternoon.

The XL takes up to a 20-pound bird. The XXL takes up to 22. Framed that way the upgrade looks thin, and for most people it is.

Work from the table, not the machine. Allowing roughly 1.25 pounds of bone-in turkey per person, a 20-pound bird already feeds fourteen to sixteen with leftovers. If you are consistently over that, you are better served by two smaller birds than one enormous one — a very large turkey cooks unevenly whatever you cook it in, and our fryer sizing guide works the numbers.

So do not buy the XXL for the two pounds. Buy it for the digital control, which is the genuine difference and is discussed below. If you want neither, the XL is the better value by a clear margin.

This is the real upgrade, and it is worth more to a nervous first-timer than to an experienced cook.

An analog fryer has a thermostat dial and you watch it. That is entirely workable, and it is what most people use. But two things go wrong on a first fry: the oil drifts off temperature after the cold bird goes in and nobody notices, and the cook runs long because everyone is busy. A digital panel holds the setpoint and counts the time, and removes both.

What it does not do is tell you the bird is cooked. No fryer does. Frying guidance puts the oil at around 350F and roughly three to four minutes per pound, but the only thing that decides doneness is 165F in the thickest part of the thigh, on a probe. The fryer controls the oil; you still own the bird. Thermometers are on our thermometer roundup.

The XXL draws 1,650 watts at 120 volts. That is not unusual for a countertop appliance, and it matters on this particular day because of what else is running.

A kitchen circuit is commonly 15 or 20 amps. A 1,650 W fryer takes a large share of a 15 A circuit on its own. Put it alongside a roaster oven, a coffee maker and a microwave on the same circuit and you will find the breaker during the cook rather than before it.

• Give the fryer a circuit that is not carrying another heater.
• Plug it straight into the wall. Not an extension lead, not a power strip.
• Work out in advance what else is plugged in where — the hosting checklist has the walk-through.

An indoor electric fryer removes the propane, the wind and the open flame, and it is a genuinely safer proposition than a burner in the yard. It does not remove the hot oil.

• The bird must be completely thawed and dry. Ice or water hitting hot oil is the mechanism behind the videos, indoors or out.
• Do not overfill. Use the fill line, and check your volume by water displacement first — method on how much oil a fryer needs.
• Lower the bird slowly. Slower than feels necessary.
• Keep a grease-rated extinguisher nearby. Never water.

The full set is on turkey fryer safety, and the step-by-step is on how to deep fry a turkey.