Deep-fried turkey is an exciting Thanksgiving menu sub-genre, bringing new flavors—and risk!—to the traditional holiday feast. To fry a turkey in the now-classic way, you hook a propane tank to a large, stand-alone burner, heat a giant vat of oil on top of it, then rely on arm strength to lower your bird into the scalding oil and hope to not make a splash. It cooks remarkably quickly and some people swear by the crisp skin and juicy meat, but damn, there are some downsides, not the least of which is that they're dangerous enough to have spawned their own sub-genre of flaming-turkey-fryer disaster videos[1].
So when Cuisinart put their name on what had been a Waring fryer after Waring dumped their consumer line in 2014, I was intrigued. Their Extra-Large Rotisserie Fryer and Steamer is essentially a large, electric countertop frying vessel where only the bottom third is filled with oil. You lower a bird on a spit into the box and a set of gears constantly rotates the spit, meaning only the lower third or so of the turkey is in the fry oil at any time. You can also remove the spit, switch over to a basket, and use the setup as a traditional deep fryer.
If you do a bit of frying, especially turkey frying, you may already see how clever this all is. You'll immediately catch on to the safety angle. Instead of wishing you had a derrick to lower the turkey into the oil, here you enclose it in a basket on the spit, grab the spit with a handle and lower it into a "labyrinth"—a back-and-forth channel the ends go through to prevent dropping the bird and splashing hot oil on you and your loved ones....