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Oster 0DF540 Classic Stainless-Steel Immersion Deep Fryer

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Product Description Color: Stainless Steel w/ Black Accents Reviews this was recommended on TV show "test kitchen" It certainly lived up to all the good points that they said it had. i am a experinced food service worker. this is as close to a comercial machice as any i have seen. Been "cookin" for 25 years. This deep fryer is the first I've ever owned. Until this point, I would use a pan and the stove-top. This appliance is easy to clean, heats up fast and keeps the heat at temp for the duration of the fry. One should not overfill the basket of course. Highly recommend it! When my old deep fryer stopped heating up, I ordered this one on the recommendation of a Cooks review. I have had this fryer for just a few weeks (I waited about 80 days after ordering)and am very satisfied with it's performance. The oil heats quickly and foods fry well. Safety features work too-I haven't had any problem with the magnetic plug coming undone and the basket can be lowered and raised easily with the lid on. The basket is roomy and the wire is woven tightly enough to keep small bits from falling through. However, I am surprised that this deep fryer has no timer on it. It's not a deal breaker, but would have been nice. The other thing I wish was that the basket handle could fold down on the outside when not in use. The handle only folds down on the inside which won't work with oil in it. My old deep fryer had a timer, a fold down handle on the outside and a lid on a hinge -so you don't have to find a place to set the lid when you open the fryer. Nice design features, but it didn't heat up as quickly as the Oster. I decided to buy a new fryer after I spent 45 minutes trying to fry up some beer battered zucchini sticks in my tiny Fry Baby (cooking class, small vegetable-averse kids, you do the math). I don't fry often (maybe once a year?), but when I do I don't want to spend all night in the kitchen churning out small batches of greasy, floppy food, which is what I ended up doing with the Fry Baby. Cooks Illustrated sister publication, Cook's Country, rated this immersion fryer highly and that's part of the reason I picked it. The element goes right in the oil and it's supposed to maintain the oil temperature well and recover quickly after batches. That should keep food from getting overly saturated due to frying temps that are too low. It's also huge, so I thought I'd batch food more quickly and actually get to sit down and eat something that's still hot. I've only used it once (hey, I only fry once a year, but potentially more now) and it worked great. Let's do the pro and con thing: Pros: * Big fryer (3 quarts if I'm recalling correctly), so get in and get out of the kitchen and eat with everyone else * Immersion heating element did keep oil more consistently at selected frying temp * Could actually PICK a frying temp * Most all parts pull apart and can go in the dishwasher (WAY better than my poor old Fry Baby) * Has a lid on it, significant reduction in oil splatter compared to past experience * Relatively inexpensive Cons: *Big fryer (whoops, yep) Trying to figure out where to store it in my frugal bungalow kitchen; has been sitting in a chair at our kitchen table for the past 6 weeks. It's part of the family now. *Big oil consumer. Buy the gallon jug of oil to fill this up. I put quart or so of excess in a smaller, already open oil bottle we had and put cooled, used oil back in the gallon jug for storage. *No oil filtration system. DON'T try and use a coffee filter in a funnel to put used oil in a storage container. (Manual actually says just pour into storage container, slow down toward the bottom where all the gunk accumulates and just get rid of that stuff.) I thought I was being super handy with my funnel, but it took an entire Saturday to filter the entire fryer out. *Dishwasher safe, but... If you've ever fried anything or baked with oil, etc. you know oil gets freakishly sticky/tenacious. Most of the fryer parts ARE dishwasher safe, but I don't know of any dishwasher that's good enough to handle sticky oil. I had to Clorox Clean-up the sticky parts with some reservations about having future food taste like Clorox. (The sticky oil will happen with any fryer, though. Not a deal breaker) *Frying odors not eliminated - I did hold some hope that the lid and the "filter" in the lid would cut down dramatically on the fryer odors that fill my house after I fry. No such luck. Everything still smelled like a hibachi restaurant a week after the cooking. (Hide your dry cleanables.) Definitely fry near an exhaust vent and crank that fan up. * Lacks heft - The frying bowl sits in a thin-sided metal housing that has a few metal straps across an open bottom; metal lid has unrolled, thin metal edges. A little disconcerting given that I could potentially burn my house down, but I can imagine any disaster if you give me a scenario. I may be overly dramatic. Have decided to just be careful. All-in-all, would have to say that the fryer has done what I really wanted from it, which is get lots of food fried without the time commitment required with the Baby. Other more expensive fryers rotate foods in and out of the oil, have on-board oil filtration systems, etc., but I didn't think I could honestly justify the significantly higher price for something I still would only use maybe once every 3-4 months at best.