This is cooking, so Cafe Society, but a Technical Question, so mods can feel free to move it if you don’t think it should be here!
I was out deep frying 3 turkeys on Tday, and remembered how much I hate working with propane. It just doesn’t seem safe to have a vat of boiling oil 3 feet away from a supply of explosive gas. That’s when it hit me: when we deep fry indoors we use an electric appliance. Why not for the turkey deep fryer. A large portable hotplate or something with one large burner should work. Does anyone see any reason why this won’t work?
It would have to be one BIG burner element.
IIRC, turkey fryers kick out roughly 40-50,000 BTU. Compare that to a regular gas stove burner of around 8,000 BTU. Now, it’s an inexact analogy, but if an electric stove element is roughly 8,000 BTU, you’d need five or six of them hooked together somehow.
You’re probably looking at 240 volts at 50+ amps, and it’s pretty tough to find extension cords that will carry that, so you’d need a 240 volt circuit run to the backyard or wherever you want to fry.
Propane wins because it’s portable. The electric source would cost a big chunk-o-bucks to have installed, and then you’re tethered to that outlet by a six-foot cord.
BTW, there are better uses for a turkey fryer than frying turkeys. If you’re cursed like me with a wimpy electric stove and want to wok, get a cheap turkey fryer and do the wokking outside. The things also work nicely for HUGE pots of soup, chili, etc. for parties if your will sustain a “simmer” heat level.