Why Martha Stewart Has A Dismal Relationship With This Kitchen Appliance

In an interview with Homes & Gardens, celebrity homemaking doyenne Martha Stewart confessed something she hates almost as much as truffle oil: the built-in deep fryer on her home stovetop. Stewart elaborated that she had a stove with 10 burners, and she had only used the attached deep fryer perhaps once in two decades. "I'm not a big fryer," she stated. "If I fry now, I fry in a pot because it's a lot of oil to fill the deep fryer. I should have put two more burners there."

Dedicated deep fryers in the kitchen take up valuable space, but the downsides don't end there. The smell of frying food tends to linger in the air when cooking indoors, for one thing, and frying is super messy, so cleaning up your stovetop after a big fry-off may just be more trouble than it's worth. Do you have a yen for deep-fried deviled eggs or deep-fried butter? You might be better served with a portable fryer, which you can set up outdoors to control odors and splatters. 

On the other hand, you could simply opt for the leaner, simpler 21st-century option of air frying, which leaves little mess and can replicate most (though not all) of the function of deep fryers. Nowadays, it's rare to see a built-in fryer in any but the most high-end appliances, which consist of separate elements customized for bespoke kitchens. Built-in fryers may have been a midcentury status symbol, but today they're of dubious usefulness.

One Redditor showed off a deep frying rig built into their kitchen island, with the comment that it was particularly useful for game day wings. The top response amidst a sea of ambivalent comments: "I love it, but hate the smell. Moving the deep fryer outside was the best move ever." Notably, many commenters were envious of the novel setup but agreed that the cleanup was too much of a deterrent. Proving that ovens with incorporated deep fryers have always been something of a premium product, another Reddit post showed off a formerly swanky 1956 GE model, which also boasted built-in salt and pepper shakers and two separate warming drawers. Another old stove shown off on the site featured an incorporated well that, per anecdotal reports, could be used for canning, deep frying, or pressure cooking, depending on the bucket one used. 

Once upon a time, an integrated deep fryer might have been considered quite the luxury, and it's telling that an elegant celebrity like Martha Stewart ever opted for one in the first place. However, "luxurious" and "useful" aren't necessarily an overlapping Venn diagram, and it seems that this extravagance may have proved pointless to many home chefs who splashed out on an upgrade. In the 2020s, deep frying has largely given way to air frying, and modern home cooks have less patience for the mess and fragrance of deep frying indoors. Honestly, we have to side with Martha on this one; we, too, would rather have extra burners than a built-in frying well.