6 Dangerous Cooking Tasks Demonstrated By Pro Chefs _ Test Kitchen Talks _ Bon Appétit

**The Art and Safety of Deep-Frying a Turkey**

Deep-frying a turkey is a popular holiday tradition that requires some careful planning and execution to avoid accidents. One of the most critical factors in successful deep-frying is understanding how much oil is needed, which can make all the difference between a perfectly cooked bird and an explosion-prone one.

To determine the right amount of oil for your turkey, it's essential to use more than just a rough estimate. The ideal amount will depend on the size of your turkey and the depth of your pot. A good rule of thumb is to use about 3-4 gallons of oil for every bird, but this can vary depending on the specific recipe and the desired level of crispiness.

When submerging the turkey in hot oil, it's crucial to be mindful of the potential for spills. The combination of hot oil, moisture from the turkey, and a slick surface can create a perfect storm that leads to an explosion. To avoid this, make sure you have enough space around your pot and that the surrounding area is clear of any flammable materials.

One way to mitigate the risk of an explosion is to fry the turkey outside, on a large scale. This allows for better control over the situation and reduces the likelihood of spills or accidents in the kitchen. If you do choose to deep-fry indoors, it's essential to have strong, sturdy tongs and tools that can help you lower the bird into the hot oil safely.

**The Dangers of Cutting Hard Winter Squash**

When working with hard winter squash, such as acorn or butternut, it's crucial to exercise caution. The skin is incredibly hard and can be slippery, making it easy to slip up and cut yourself. This is particularly true if you're using a dull knife or trying to cut the squash on a slick surface.

To avoid accidents, it's essential to use the right tools for the job. A non-slip cutting board, such as one lined with shelf liner material, can provide traction and prevent the squash from slipping around while you're cutting it. Additionally, using a good quality Y-peeler can make it easier to remove the skin without having to cut through it.

**Tips for Safe and Successful Deep-Frying**

When deep-frying a turkey, there are several safety precautions to keep in mind. First and foremost, make sure you have enough space around your pot and that the surrounding area is clear of any flammable materials. It's also essential to use a large enough pot with enough depth to accommodate the turkey comfortably.

Another critical factor is temperature control. The oil should be heated to the correct temperature before adding the turkey, and it's crucial to monitor the temperature closely during the frying process. If you're new to deep-frying, it's a good idea to practice on smaller items before attempting to fry a whole bird.

Finally, don't underestimate the importance of patience and caution when working with hot oil. Take your time, and make sure you have all the necessary tools and equipment before starting. With practice and experience, you can master the art of deep-frying a turkey and enjoy the delicious, crispy results it produces.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: entoday we're in the test kitchen demonstrating some dangerous kitchen tasks sometimes the kitchen can feel really intimidating i mean the fact that like we're allowed to like pipe a combustible gas into our homes and then like light it on fire i've burnt myself more times than i can count if your knife is dull that to me is really dangerous cut fingers i've burnt pans burnt a lot of food we definitely learned from the scars and burns we've had the important thing is to learn the tips and tricks to be able to navigate the kitchen successfully the dangerous task is using a blowtorch yes as a cooking apparatus it's like any other tool you have to kind of know how to use it it's obviously dangerous because you're working with the flame anytime you have or you're thinking about words like caramelization charring even roasting or anything color is kind of like where this could be an additional help or just the main thing certain blow torches will have different safety mechanisms this one is off already because um it's all the way to the right righty tighty and then when you move it to the left which there is a plus sign dial so there that's telling you that you're turning it on and you're also controlling your heat as soon as you turn it on you hear the gas go on you never want to point the flame towards you like or like light a cigarette or whatever like this is like you know like see that blue flame that's ensuring that you have good enough gas because if you don't it can kind of impart like a weird taste yes gas taste that's happening yeah make sure you have like plenty of space and that there's nothing that's like really flammable around one of my favorite ways to use a torch is on fish i love mackerel i love serving it raw i love braising it cooking it searing it you're gonna know how to adjust your uh flame like meaning like how close you should get to the fish but also like how fast it's roasting you can also score this fish so that it kind of makes like little patterns too if you go to some sushi places you'll see this apparatus a lot the fat is rising which means like the cookery is happening the cookery um the great thing about a torch is that it's in your hand it's not a big grill you can control the dial and also when panicked just turn the thing off it's fun to have it also when you're having a dinner party and people are like oh flames that's true party truck yeah the dangerous task i want to talk about today is flambe exciting i mean i always got so excited like when you go to restaurants as a kid i didn't understand what flambe was i was just like ooh fire so i'm going to order that because you get to see it's a spectacle it's a show flambe basically means to ignite your food that has liquor in it naturally it's dangerous because something will be on fire that something should be your vessel and should never be anything outside of your vessel the purpose on flambeing is to create this like dramatic visual impression for to develop like a deep flavor i think the best way to do flambe is with either a longer match or a multi-purpose lighter which has a longer neck so you have a good distance between your hand and the hot pan and today we're going to demonstrate from bay with banana foster so what i want to make sure before doing flambe is that there's no flammable items anywhere around this pen there's no paper like no glass no sharp items just in case anything happened if you have like let's say your microwave here maybe that's not the best best stove or not the best place to do flambe because if the fire comes up it might burn your microwave and you don't want that clothing wise i would say just make sure you don't have anything that's like draping so don't wear tassels yeah don't wear towels when you're flambe i have uh dark brown here and then my lighter are you ready for the flame let's do it so first thing i'm going to turn off the heat pour in the rum and usually it'll last for like maybe 10 seconds and the alcohol will naturally burn off and then you're done it didn't really like take a lot to make a flame so if you're like not aware or not like being careful with it things could go wrong so it's always better to be safer the dangerous cooking task that i'm going to be demonstrating today is just chopping very spicy peppers a lot of people wouldn't necessarily think of this as a dangerous task but i've seen burns all over my arms and my face so step one one of the most important things i think you should do is always use gloves i have also like chopped up a scotch bonnet pepper without gloves and then touched my eyes accidentally and that is a big no-no because then it's you're just burning for hours do you cook a lot with crazy spicy peppers always that's a very jamaican thing like we always use spicy peppers and everything scotch bonnets go in everything i like to cut around the pepper so i just kind of like rotate it you're avoiding the membrane and those seeds inside the pepper that's where most of the spice is packed there's a chemical in the peppers that makes it spicy called capsaicin the more that pepper has the spicier it's going to be so it's like that white inner part this isn't it's not that white in a scotch bonnet particularly but you'll notice that in like a jalapeno if you don't have gloves and you do want to incorporate these peppers yeah and your hands get too spicy you can always make like a mixture out of baking soda and water and you can rub that all into your hands let it dry and wash it off and that'll help to neutralize the capsaicin in the peppers so this one it's actually way harder to avoid the seeds in this one so it's more in my opinion it's more about like slicing it if you slice it in half on the vertical part of the pepper you can kind of scrape out those seeds and just dispose of those and it just kind of clears out those really spicy seeds in the center either use a separate cutting board or slice your spicy peppers last that way you're not incorporating all that spicy work so hard to eliminate peppers can be slippery so when you're not you you know when you're trying to run through it fast i've had it i have had the knife slipped too so oh god yeah that could be dangerous so it's also just kind of again like taking your time to do these things absolutely also if you just want like a little bit of heat infused into like a pasta sauce for example you can simply pierce a really hot pepper and just drop it into the sauce rather than exposing any of that inner membrane or allowing for those seeds to come out of the pot like a slow gas it's a slow gassing kind of okay and that's on hot peppers baby that's it i want to talk about butchering large fish flatfish there's a great big fluke i mean that is a big flatfish i mean they get a lot bigger than that like a halibut can be like the size of a person but fluke i just had no idea it's not a vegetable where you're going you know going down or any of that sort you have to have a lot of different movements here and also when it comes down to is the knife i'm using a fillet knife i like to use it for flat fish because obviously the knife itself bends and so i can get in between the bones here and really just smoothly just make sure i get the best yield out of the fillet if you're not aware of where the bone pin bones are at you're not aware of the structure of the animal where the fins you know sometimes the fins have the spikes yeah like all these backgrounds right here these are these are pointy with cutting boards it needs to be stable there's a wet towel underneath these both of these cutting boards i have these two towels here every time i take a stroke i'm wiping it down here correctly so it can the knife itself can be cleaned also i'm wearing gloves and then you know taking your time and being able to understand the anatomy of the fish there's a an evident line that's coming up the spine right here the vertebrae of the fish this is one fillet and then this one fillet right here first when you make an incision you want to feel like a doctor you want to just follow that line and you don't want to dig too deep you just want to use the tip of your knife and you're going to take it all the way down okay right here is the collar of the fish so you want to just take it in position right over here what you want to hear closely is the clicking of the bone when you're bending your knife okay so you want to bend your knife you want to lift it one long stroke okay you're not losing yield you're also using the bones as a guide don't do jagged strokes one long stroke one long stroke and you can hear when you're cutting the knife you hear the bones and you just cut through here and boom it's one fillet right there so if you're cutting this improperly you can get your bones in your fillet and then you'll just have more time cleaning the fish and getting those bones out i hate fish bones i mean i'm like psychotic about it i've got like tweezers pliers you know i go at it like all kinds and the most important part about playing uh fish is chris stood all the way over there he's a righty right so i stood on his left if he were a lefty i just stood on his right that's like 90 of the game the dangerous task i want to talk about is deep frying specifically deep frying turkey oh yeah or any big bird i don't have a turkey with me today i have a chicken but the same kind of tips and tricks and technique you can apply to that so the first thing you need to make sure is that you have an appropriate sized pot whenever your turkey or bird arrives you leave it whole inside whatever packaging it came okay and then you take the whole bird and put it in your pot now second we need to know how much oil we have to fill we can do that by not actually adding oil but filling this pot up with water so where people go wrong is not using the appropriate amount of oil most likely using more than it's required the oil spills over the turkey has a lot of moisture hitting on hot oil all of that reacts right and that's what causes the explosion okay so now we have actually we're only putting in this much oil about right so now we know that when we submerge our bird in hot oil it is not going to bubble over and to be honest i would even use a deeper pot than what i have right now how do you usually drop your bird in for this i could use a tong right you can do that so you have extra support that way you know the bird is not going to plop into hot oil and splatter right i also recommend wearing gloves like heat proof gloves and then you can gently lower this down there's a reason why people fry turkey outside a it is a large scale frying that you're doing b if there is oil spill you kind of don't want it happening in your kitchen if you do it outside you know the ground is a much better place to kind of absorb the oil oil spoils on the stove can be dangerous and also it's just difficult to clean if you could clean it like instantly that's the best but if you can't putting salt on top of it like for it's a good temporary method or flour i've used all-purpose flour all in all if you are deep frying a whole bird or turkey just make sure you're using an appropriate size pot that has enough height to it tentatively measure out how much oil you're going to use have some strong sturdy tongs and tools that is going to help you lower turkey in the hot oil and then remove it safely out of the hot oil as well there's no smart way to cut yourself and you're almost guaranteed to cut yourself on something like so stupid all right but squash hard winter squash is one of those things like it sends people to the hospital every single day that skin is so hard if you're using a dull knife you're gonna have to apply so much force to it if you slip if your cutting board slips okay if the cutting board surface is you know kind of slick like this the squash can slide right off of it anything can happen and squash has that up thing in it where it's like it's like weirdly like starchy yet slippery inside so it kind of does that same thing that butter does where it's like your knife will suddenly just like shoot right through it it's real the danger is real this is like what not to do again this is a very slick surface the squash is going to want to kind of shoot across this like as i'm applying force to it there's nothing underneath it you know these acrylic boards are great for cutting proteins but that's it all right throw it over your shoulder all right well there could have been somebody behind me see that's why it's dangerous so first things first something that's like non-slip this is some of that shelf liner material i just keep this like with my kit all the time so the next thing is see already this wooden surface it's a little bit more abrasive than that acrylic surface okay so this is not moving and then the squash is going to have a harder time moving i want to trim the top okay i want to trim the bottom it's it's very hard in there so you want to make sure you know you're kind of getting past that at this point i'm going to treat the squash as though it's like two different things okay i almost don't have to use my knife again a good quality y peeler is going to allow you to take the right amount of peel off without using your knife and how much better is that and how much safer is that it's really hard to send yourself to the hospital with this somebody's probably done it but like there's like a plaque with that person's face on it in the er you don't want to be that guy though because it's they are the one have you noticed that all the cuts i made i was driving the knife from a high point down to the cutting board i didn't go like this and try to muscle through it this way i'm not laying it flat and kind of going like this because if i slip boom bye bye harold always you know the claw start starting high and going down now you have a stable surface to cut this in half and you can actually do it evenly and now you're good to go get yourself some of this this is fire yeah you can make all the mistakes take your time be patient with yourself and not try to rush through things it's just all these little practices that you have to be in the habit of and when you do you know you're able to minimize and compartmentalize risk use appropriate tools have enough space don't wear tassels and you should be fine no no dual knives pleasetoday we're in the test kitchen demonstrating some dangerous kitchen tasks sometimes the kitchen can feel really intimidating i mean the fact that like we're allowed to like pipe a combustible gas into our homes and then like light it on fire i've burnt myself more times than i can count if your knife is dull that to me is really dangerous cut fingers i've burnt pans burnt a lot of food we definitely learned from the scars and burns we've had the important thing is to learn the tips and tricks to be able to navigate the kitchen successfully the dangerous task is using a blowtorch yes as a cooking apparatus it's like any other tool you have to kind of know how to use it it's obviously dangerous because you're working with the flame anytime you have or you're thinking about words like caramelization charring even roasting or anything color is kind of like where this could be an additional help or just the main thing certain blow torches will have different safety mechanisms this one is off already because um it's all the way to the right righty tighty and then when you move it to the left which there is a plus sign dial so there that's telling you that you're turning it on and you're also controlling your heat as soon as you turn it on you hear the gas go on you never want to point the flame towards you like or like light a cigarette or whatever like this is like you know like see that blue flame that's ensuring that you have good enough gas because if you don't it can kind of impart like a weird taste yes gas taste that's happening yeah make sure you have like plenty of space and that there's nothing that's like really flammable around one of my favorite ways to use a torch is on fish i love mackerel i love serving it raw i love braising it cooking it searing it you're gonna know how to adjust your uh flame like meaning like how close you should get to the fish but also like how fast it's roasting you can also score this fish so that it kind of makes like little patterns too if you go to some sushi places you'll see this apparatus a lot the fat is rising which means like the cookery is happening the cookery um the great thing about a torch is that it's in your hand it's not a big grill you can control the dial and also when panicked just turn the thing off it's fun to have it also when you're having a dinner party and people are like oh flames that's true party truck yeah the dangerous task i want to talk about today is flambe exciting i mean i always got so excited like when you go to restaurants as a kid i didn't understand what flambe was i was just like ooh fire so i'm going to order that because you get to see it's a spectacle it's a show flambe basically means to ignite your food that has liquor in it naturally it's dangerous because something will be on fire that something should be your vessel and should never be anything outside of your vessel the purpose on flambeing is to create this like dramatic visual impression for to develop like a deep flavor i think the best way to do flambe is with either a longer match or a multi-purpose lighter which has a longer neck so you have a good distance between your hand and the hot pan and today we're going to demonstrate from bay with banana foster so what i want to make sure before doing flambe is that there's no flammable items anywhere around this pen there's no paper like no glass no sharp items just in case anything happened if you have like let's say your microwave here maybe that's not the best best stove or not the best place to do flambe because if the fire comes up it might burn your microwave and you don't want that clothing wise i would say just make sure you don't have anything that's like draping so don't wear tassels yeah don't wear towels when you're flambe i have uh dark brown here and then my lighter are you ready for the flame let's do it so first thing i'm going to turn off the heat pour in the rum and usually it'll last for like maybe 10 seconds and the alcohol will naturally burn off and then you're done it didn't really like take a lot to make a flame so if you're like not aware or not like being careful with it things could go wrong so it's always better to be safer the dangerous cooking task that i'm going to be demonstrating today is just chopping very spicy peppers a lot of people wouldn't necessarily think of this as a dangerous task but i've seen burns all over my arms and my face so step one one of the most important things i think you should do is always use gloves i have also like chopped up a scotch bonnet pepper without gloves and then touched my eyes accidentally and that is a big no-no because then it's you're just burning for hours do you cook a lot with crazy spicy peppers always that's a very jamaican thing like we always use spicy peppers and everything scotch bonnets go in everything i like to cut around the pepper so i just kind of like rotate it you're avoiding the membrane and those seeds inside the pepper that's where most of the spice is packed there's a chemical in the peppers that makes it spicy called capsaicin the more that pepper has the spicier it's going to be so it's like that white inner part this isn't it's not that white in a scotch bonnet particularly but you'll notice that in like a jalapeno if you don't have gloves and you do want to incorporate these peppers yeah and your hands get too spicy you can always make like a mixture out of baking soda and water and you can rub that all into your hands let it dry and wash it off and that'll help to neutralize the capsaicin in the peppers so this one it's actually way harder to avoid the seeds in this one so it's more in my opinion it's more about like slicing it if you slice it in half on the vertical part of the pepper you can kind of scrape out those seeds and just dispose of those and it just kind of clears out those really spicy seeds in the center either use a separate cutting board or slice your spicy peppers last that way you're not incorporating all that spicy work so hard to eliminate peppers can be slippery so when you're not you you know when you're trying to run through it fast i've had it i have had the knife slipped too so oh god yeah that could be dangerous so it's also just kind of again like taking your time to do these things absolutely also if you just want like a little bit of heat infused into like a pasta sauce for example you can simply pierce a really hot pepper and just drop it into the sauce rather than exposing any of that inner membrane or allowing for those seeds to come out of the pot like a slow gas it's a slow gassing kind of okay and that's on hot peppers baby that's it i want to talk about butchering large fish flatfish there's a great big fluke i mean that is a big flatfish i mean they get a lot bigger than that like a halibut can be like the size of a person but fluke i just had no idea it's not a vegetable where you're going you know going down or any of that sort you have to have a lot of different movements here and also when it comes down to is the knife i'm using a fillet knife i like to use it for flat fish because obviously the knife itself bends and so i can get in between the bones here and really just smoothly just make sure i get the best yield out of the fillet if you're not aware of where the bone pin bones are at you're not aware of the structure of the animal where the fins you know sometimes the fins have the spikes yeah like all these backgrounds right here these are these are pointy with cutting boards it needs to be stable there's a wet towel underneath these both of these cutting boards i have these two towels here every time i take a stroke i'm wiping it down here correctly so it can the knife itself can be cleaned also i'm wearing gloves and then you know taking your time and being able to understand the anatomy of the fish there's a an evident line that's coming up the spine right here the vertebrae of the fish this is one fillet and then this one fillet right here first when you make an incision you want to feel like a doctor you want to just follow that line and you don't want to dig too deep you just want to use the tip of your knife and you're going to take it all the way down okay right here is the collar of the fish so you want to just take it in position right over here what you want to hear closely is the clicking of the bone when you're bending your knife okay so you want to bend your knife you want to lift it one long stroke okay you're not losing yield you're also using the bones as a guide don't do jagged strokes one long stroke one long stroke and you can hear when you're cutting the knife you hear the bones and you just cut through here and boom it's one fillet right there so if you're cutting this improperly you can get your bones in your fillet and then you'll just have more time cleaning the fish and getting those bones out i hate fish bones i mean i'm like psychotic about it i've got like tweezers pliers you know i go at it like all kinds and the most important part about playing uh fish is chris stood all the way over there he's a righty right so i stood on his left if he were a lefty i just stood on his right that's like 90 of the game the dangerous task i want to talk about is deep frying specifically deep frying turkey oh yeah or any big bird i don't have a turkey with me today i have a chicken but the same kind of tips and tricks and technique you can apply to that so the first thing you need to make sure is that you have an appropriate sized pot whenever your turkey or bird arrives you leave it whole inside whatever packaging it came okay and then you take the whole bird and put it in your pot now second we need to know how much oil we have to fill we can do that by not actually adding oil but filling this pot up with water so where people go wrong is not using the appropriate amount of oil most likely using more than it's required the oil spills over the turkey has a lot of moisture hitting on hot oil all of that reacts right and that's what causes the explosion okay so now we have actually we're only putting in this much oil about right so now we know that when we submerge our bird in hot oil it is not going to bubble over and to be honest i would even use a deeper pot than what i have right now how do you usually drop your bird in for this i could use a tong right you can do that so you have extra support that way you know the bird is not going to plop into hot oil and splatter right i also recommend wearing gloves like heat proof gloves and then you can gently lower this down there's a reason why people fry turkey outside a it is a large scale frying that you're doing b if there is oil spill you kind of don't want it happening in your kitchen if you do it outside you know the ground is a much better place to kind of absorb the oil oil spoils on the stove can be dangerous and also it's just difficult to clean if you could clean it like instantly that's the best but if you can't putting salt on top of it like for it's a good temporary method or flour i've used all-purpose flour all in all if you are deep frying a whole bird or turkey just make sure you're using an appropriate size pot that has enough height to it tentatively measure out how much oil you're going to use have some strong sturdy tongs and tools that is going to help you lower turkey in the hot oil and then remove it safely out of the hot oil as well there's no smart way to cut yourself and you're almost guaranteed to cut yourself on something like so stupid all right but squash hard winter squash is one of those things like it sends people to the hospital every single day that skin is so hard if you're using a dull knife you're gonna have to apply so much force to it if you slip if your cutting board slips okay if the cutting board surface is you know kind of slick like this the squash can slide right off of it anything can happen and squash has that up thing in it where it's like it's like weirdly like starchy yet slippery inside so it kind of does that same thing that butter does where it's like your knife will suddenly just like shoot right through it it's real the danger is real this is like what not to do again this is a very slick surface the squash is going to want to kind of shoot across this like as i'm applying force to it there's nothing underneath it you know these acrylic boards are great for cutting proteins but that's it all right throw it over your shoulder all right well there could have been somebody behind me see that's why it's dangerous so first things first something that's like non-slip this is some of that shelf liner material i just keep this like with my kit all the time so the next thing is see already this wooden surface it's a little bit more abrasive than that acrylic surface okay so this is not moving and then the squash is going to have a harder time moving i want to trim the top okay i want to trim the bottom it's it's very hard in there so you want to make sure you know you're kind of getting past that at this point i'm going to treat the squash as though it's like two different things okay i almost don't have to use my knife again a good quality y peeler is going to allow you to take the right amount of peel off without using your knife and how much better is that and how much safer is that it's really hard to send yourself to the hospital with this somebody's probably done it but like there's like a plaque with that person's face on it in the er you don't want to be that guy though because it's they are the one have you noticed that all the cuts i made i was driving the knife from a high point down to the cutting board i didn't go like this and try to muscle through it this way i'm not laying it flat and kind of going like this because if i slip boom bye bye harold always you know the claw start starting high and going down now you have a stable surface to cut this in half and you can actually do it evenly and now you're good to go get yourself some of this this is fire yeah you can make all the mistakes take your time be patient with yourself and not try to rush through things it's just all these little practices that you have to be in the habit of and when you do you know you're able to minimize and compartmentalize risk use appropriate tools have enough space don't wear tassels and you should be fine no no dual knives please\n"