Why You Shouldn’t Bake Pies in a Deep Fryer
Oven resource management is one of the most difficult parts of preparing a Thanksgiving dinner. If you’ve just run out of oven space and still have one more cake to bake, it’s only natural to start looking at your trusty convection oven on your countertop. “After all, why not?” you may ask yourself. Why don’t I bake a pie in the deep fryer?
And that’s a great question, because deep fryers are so good at so many things that at first glance they might seem like the perfect solution to a long-standing Thanksgiving dilemma. Unfortunately, their principle of operation is fundamentally incompatible with cake baking.
Problem 1 with baking a pie in a deep fryer: the laws of thermodynamics
A pie is basically an open or semi-open puddle of liquid contained in two layers of solids (crust and plate). To get the middle toasted, you usually need to heat the entire shebang from all sides. But deep fryers heat from top to bottom and blow the resulting hot air with a fan; they have no bottom heating element at all.
Anyone who has taken an introductory physics course can see where this leads. (Although I barely walked past mine.) The circulating air heats some objects efficiently, but the large amounts of wet material and glass that make up many pie plates are not nearly as strong. Baking a pie in a deep fryer is like heating a pool with a hair dryer pointed at the surface: the top inch or two might get a little hot, but you can forget about the sides and bottom.
This is exactly what happened to my poor doomed apple pie. The top of the crust began to burn after exactly five minutes. Even after the heat was turned off and another solid hour was allowed, the sides and bottom remained pale, soft, and, thanks to the combination of melted butter and apple juice, moist . Wet, wet through and through. The apples really started poking through the melted crust on the sides, which I have not seen before:
Problem 2 baking a cake in the deep fat fryer: Troubleshooting not possible
Deep fryer cooking is not an exact science. You almost always need to make small adjustments along the way, be it turning food over for an even browning, changing temperatures, or both. In a conventional oven, the same goes for the cake: you can cover the overcooked pieces with foil to prevent them from burning, place a baking sheet under the plate to brown the bottom, or both.
Placing the cake in the deep fryer robs you of the troubleshooting options. The usual air fryer tricks no longer apply: you can’t flip the cake over to brown the bottom, and since you already need to use a lower temperature than the oven, further reducing heat to compensate for the overcooked lid will make the bottom even less likely to heat up.
Worse, the pie tricks actually get in the way of the fryer. Foil screens fly in the air in a wind tunnel, so they don’t stay in place long enough to help. Even if you put the baking sheet in the basket, it would simply prevent airflow from entering the bottom of the pan and therefore any heat.
Deep Fryer Pie Problem 3: Mess (my lord, mess)
I baked a few cakes in a day, so I fully expected the heavy burnt sugar to come off the floor of my deep fryer. However, the sheer scale of the mess blew into my head. By the time I gave up and took out the pie, a puddle of butter and overflowing filling was dripping from the doors onto the counter; the situation inside was somehow worse.
This could be, at least in part, because of my deep fryer, which is a miniature version of the convection ovens used in industrial bakeries, all the way down to French doors. The basket model could have been better at keeping clutter up, but haters (me) will say it could also have been filled with pie drops and overheated. Who should I tell?
For me, the clutter factor is the final nail in the deep fryer’s pie coffin. The extra clutter is never a bonus, but on Thanksgiving it could be a legitimate liability – and the results don’t seem to be worth the risk. Bake pies in the oven, my friends. This is the simpler, safer, and better method in every way.