(light funky music) - Here is where we cook our turkeys. So the most important
thing to be concerned about when frying turkeys is safety. What we do is we, because we're gonna be
cooking with propane, what we wanna do is have it at a distance from the house or a fence, 'cause we cook it on our rocks. This is gonna be the base, and I'll open this up. (plastic crinkles) And I'm gonna hook my
propane tank up to this. And we're gonna position this so it's a good distance away from anything that could catch fire. Let's get the propane tank, and then we're gonna get the turkey. Okay, so what's important is to have the propane tank a good distance away from the burner. Away almost extend the
hose as much as you can. And then you wanna make sure that that burner is level, so that when the pot, when the turkey pot's sitting on top, and the oil's in it, you want the oil to be nice and flat and not tipping over. Looks good, that is. (metal scraping) One of the important things about frying a turkey is making sure that there's
no water left in the pot. There can't be any water on
the turkey or in the pot. So I just cleaned out the pot, and now I'm gonna dry it real good, making sure that there's
nothin' left in here, before I put the oil in. I'm gonna let it dry out
a little bit in the sun, and then I'm gonna get this thing goin'. I'm gonna test out the burner now, hook up the propane tank, just make sure that
everything's firing evenly. (propane hissing) Get that thing cookin'. You wanna make sure that
nothing splatters all over you, because this oil can stain. And of course, you know, have my traditional turkey frying apron. The oil comes in three-gallon jugs, and the tank'll hold
up to three-and-a-half. And the reason that they
sell it in three-gallon jugs is because then you need to buy two. And there's no way that you
can buy just one gallon, so they gotcha. Okay, so that's three gallons of oil, and we're gonna be frying three turkeys. And each one of the turkeys
is almost 17 pounds. So 17 pounds, once I put it in here could cover the turkey. May, it may not. Make sure that the top of the pot's good. Yeah, that's good. (propane hissing) - What it tells you to do is, you fill it with water, and then you put your turkey in. And then you measure it and see how much oil you'll need. You establish a fill line with water, but I don't like to do that because the water will cause the oil to flash back at you. So I just kinda use experience. And I've been doin' this for 10 years, so it's just kind of a feel touch thing. - [Man] So what would you tell a first-timer turkey cooker? - Be careful. (light funky music) So we're at 150 right now. We're gonna wanna get this up to 350, and then we're gonna put the turkeys in. And when we put the turkey in, it's gonna bring that
temperature way down, probably below 300. You wanna cook between 300 and 350. What we'll do is after
we put the turkey in, it'll go down below 300, we'll turn up the burner again. We'll really fire it up. We'll get that temperature
between 300, 350, get it to stabilize. And then we let it sit. So we're gonna cook three turkeys today. Our turkeys are almost 17 pounds. And what we're gonna do is cook the turkeys between three and three-and-a-half minutes per pound. So that's gonna take us
almost an hour per turkey. So I just backed off. We said we wanted to eat at four o'clock so I just backed it down. Three hours before that, have 'em all sliced up so I can clean up, and by four o'clock we'll be eating. We started at noon. While the oil is getting warm, so we wanna take the turkey
out of the refrigerator and get it at room temperature. So room temperature out
here in Southern California, best to keep it outside. Prepared these turkeys two days ago, and what we did was we injected them with some Cajun flavors. And then we put some rub on it. So this turkey is a jalapeno butter, so we inject it in several areas throughout the turkey, and then we put a rub over it, and let it sit. So this turkey is weighed at 16.98 pounds. So we will cook this, 17
pounds times three minutes. So almost an hour. (propane hissing) All right, gonna get the turkey, get ready to go. Mount it onto the rack. Get this thing as dry as we can. All right, so we're at 350 now. So it's important, for safety reasons, 'cause that oil's gonna spit back, to get some good gloves
to protect your arms. And then I take the next step and I put on some safety glasses because that oil's gonna
spit back at you too. And we're ready to drop it in. We're at 350, you can see that. I'm gonna pull that. Now when you put it in, you just wanna drop in
a little bit at a time 'cause it's gonna spit back a little bit. Here we go. (oil sizzling) Somebody take note of the time, too. Drop in a little at a time. You wanna cook the
turkey till the inside's, there it is. Perfect height for the oil. Till the inside's 180 degrees. And that should be if the calculations are three to three-and-a-half
pounds per minute. There you go. (light funky music) Thermometer's back in, and we wanna get the oil back up to between 300, 350 consistently. We're doin' pretty good. Make sure the thermometer's
not inside the turkey. You just want it in the oil. (oil sizzling) Every three to five minutes, you wanna go and check the temperature and make sure that we're
in that 300 to 350 range. And you can see we're just hittin' a little bit over 300 right now. I'm gonna let that go. Go back to the game. We are about to, it's about 10 minutes until showtime for the turkey, but what I wanna do is make sure that we're not dryin' it out. So I will check the internal temperature for the turkey right now, and I use these small thermometers. And what we wanna do is the
temperature for the turkey should be about 180 degrees inside, so we're gonna see where we're at. (oil sizzling) This baby done, we're out. Here's the reason for the gloves. All right. (foil rattling) There we go. That's a turkey. That's good and moist inside, and what we'll do is we'll let that turkey sit for about another half hour. Let it cool down. It's still cookin' inside, in fact, 'cause that oil is still there. Let it sit for about a half hour, and then we slice it up. That's it, happy Thanksgiving. (light funky music) - Mm, good eatins'.
