The Best Propane Turkey Fryers

A propane fryer is judged on whether it can hold 350F outdoors and whether it is complete. Those are the two failure modes.

• Can it hold temperature in the real weather? Burner output matters, but wind matters more. A 59,000 BTU burner in a draught loses to a 38,000 BTU burner behind a shield. If the kit has no wind protection, you build one — see below.
• What is the pot made of? Stainless lasts and costs; aluminum heats faster and wears out. There is no wrong answer, only a wrong expectation.
• Is the rig actually complete? A fryer is a burner, a stand, a hose and regulator, a pot, a lifting rack, a hook and a thermometer. Every kit here ships most of that; only some ship the thermometer.
• Is the stand steady? Welded beats bolt-together. The single worst outcome in outdoor frying is a pot of hot oil going over, and the stand is what stops it.

What is not on the list: brand prestige, non-stick coatings and anything described as a basting system. None of them changes whether the bird cooks safely.

Burner ratings in this category run from roughly 30,000 to around 60,000 BTU, and the honest answer is that anything from about 33,000 upwards will fry a turkey. BTU buys you two things: how fast the oil gets to 350F in the first place, and how fast it comes back after a cold bird drops the temperature.

The National Turkey Federation puts the initial heat-up at 45 minutes to an hour for a typical volume of oil. A bigger burner shortens that. It does not make the bird cook faster — cooking time is set by the oil temperature and the weight of the turkey, not by the burner.

Where output does earn its keep is recovery. Lowering an 18-pound bird into three gallons of oil pulls the temperature down hard. A 38,000 BTU burner brings it back; a 33,000 BTU burner brings it back more slowly, and the gap widens the colder and windier it is. If you fry in a genuinely cold climate, buy output. If you fry in a garage doorway in mild weather, do not pay for it.

One thing no burner rating will fix: an underfilled propane tank. Start with a full tank. A 20-pound cylinder has plenty for a fry, and running out at 320F with a bird in the oil is a problem with no good solution.

Almost every long, frustrating turkey fry has the same cause: the oil would not come back up to temperature, and the reason was moving air. A burner under an open pot in a 10 mph breeze loses a large share of its output to the air around the pot rather than the pot itself.

Three fixes, in order of how well they work:

• Buy the shield. A 360-degree windshield built into the cooker, as on the Bayou Classic kit, is the clean answer.
• Site the fryer out of the wind. The lee side of the house, a wall, a fence. Not inside a garage, not under an eave, not on a deck — every safety source we cite is explicit that frying happens outdoors on a flat non-combustible surface well away from the building.
• Build a break. Two sheets of plywood or a folding windbreak, well clear of the flame, upwind. Nothing combustible within a couple of feet of the burner.

The other wind rule is about the propane tank. State Farm’s guidance is to keep at least two feet between the burner and the tank, and that distance is not negotiable just because the hose is short.

Propane frying has a short list of rules that account for nearly every bad outcome. The full version is in turkey fryer safety; the short version is here.

Outdoors, flat, non-combustible, away from the house. Never a garage, never a deck, never under an overhang.

Completely thawed, completely dry. Ice in the cavity is the cause of the videos. Work the timetable backwards with the thawing guide.

Set the oil level with water first. Overfilling is the other half of the overflow problem. The displacement method takes five minutes the day before.

Turn the burner off before the bird goes in. Then relight once the bird is settled. This single step removes the flame from the equation at the exact moment oil is most likely to come over the side.

Never water on an oil fire. A dry-chemical extinguisher within arm’s reach, and if the oil starts smoking, shut the burner off.

Long gloves, closed shoes, nobody underfoot. Children and pets inside the house, not in the yard.

The part of propane frying that people plan for least is the three gallons of hot oil left in the pot. It stays hot enough to burn for an hour or more after the burner is off, so the first rule is that nothing moves until it is at room temperature — which in practice means the pot sits where it is until the evening.

Then you decide whether to keep it. Strained, cooled and stored airtight somewhere cool and dark, frying oil is reusable; most kitchens get three to five fries out of a batch, and high-oleic and peanut oils outlast vegetable oil. The test is the smell and the behaviour — can you reuse turkey fryer oil covers exactly when to stop.

If you are not keeping it, it does not go down a drain under any circumstances. Cooled oil into a sealable container and into the bin, or to a recycling drop-off that turns it into biodiesel — the disposal guide has the method. Then the pot itself gets cleaned properly, which is its own short job: how to clean a turkey fryer.