22/11/2022
There’s three times more cooking fires on Thanksgiving than any other day during the year, and yes, turkey fryers out there, we’re looking at you.
Let's take a look at grease fires and the do’s and don’ts of turkey frying, so you can be thankful later on that you didn’t burn your house down this year.
So what exactly sets oil ablaze?
Oils have specific temperatures called “smoke points” where they break down and release airborne compounds. Cooking oils themselves aren’t flammable at these temperatures, these airborne compounds are really flammable.
If the heat isn’t regulated, oils may reach their auto-ignition temperatures, where they can burst into flames. If your oil is releasing dark smoke, it’s hit the smoke point, so turn the heat down asap!
Turkey fryers can also go boom because water and oil don’t mix. Water molecules are polar, which means one side is slightly positive and the other is slightly negative. Oil, on the other hand, does not share this quality. Or in other words, it is nonpolar.
Ultimately, this means that polar and nonpolar molecules try really hard to stay away from each other -- and it shows. And for this reason, frozen turkeys are prone to catastrophe!
When the ice and water in a frozen turkey makes contact with hot, it instantly vaporizes into steam and expands to seventeen hundred times its original volume.
This causes the oil in the frier to bubble over. Not only can this burn you, these smaller particles of cooking oil can quickly ignite if they reach the heat source.
So be careful out there all you turkey fryers!
