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What's Decomposing - 5 Gallons of Peanut Oil
After Thanksgiving most people have leftover Turkey, I have leftover peanut oil. You see I deep fry my turkeys in peanut oil. I've been doing it for about 5 years now and I don't think I'll ever cook a turkey in the oven again. You can deep fry a 12 pound bird in roughly 40 minutes and it's juicy and delicious. That's so quick that I usually cook two turkeys for my Thanksgiving guests. But the leftover peanut oil is usually a hassle to get rid of. They say you can strain it through cheese cloth and use the oil again but that just sounds gross to me. The oil is pretty dark after frying two turkeys.
This year I watched Alton Brown of Good Eats deep fry a turkey and he just poured his used peanut oil in a corner of his yard. So I figured why not dump it into on of my compost bins. They say that you should add meat or fat to your bin or else you'll attract pests but my bin is so big (4'x 8' and 4 feet high) and so filled to the top that the oil will only be a small percentage. So why not try it and see what happens. 
With this cool spigot that I have on my fryer pot, I was able to slowly drip the peanut oil into the center of my pile. If I can find enough greens to get my compost pile hot, I'm going to have some deep fried compost.
Now that the leftover oil is taken care of, I can start working on that leftover turkey. It's much easier to get rid of.
4 Comments:
Yes, I wouldn't do this too often but since that compost bin was about 4 feet by 8 feet and 4 feet deep, it was no problem. When I spread the finished compost out I didn't have any big wads of grease inside the pile so I'm calling it a successful experiment.