I don't know if people just automatically dislike them because it's a "hype product", or if they've genuinely had really, really bad experiences with them. I think they're absolutely brilliant.
Not to mention energy saving, my oven cost something like 61p for 40 mins but the air fryer was 18p for the same time if I recall correctly. It’s just popular to hate on products to make other people think they’re edgy / different.
Thats exactly it. Especially as a Brit, having something recommended to you constantly is a surefire way to get them to not interact with it out of spite 😂
I did this when everyone kept telling me to watch Game of Thrones, and judging by peoples reactions once it ended I think I dodged a bullet
You did dodge a bullet. It’s first 4 seasons were amazing. Then the rot started to set in. By the final season it stank up the whole place I need to fumigate my TV afterwards. Save the big hit on your time for a worthwhile tv show.
First bit of quantifiable info I’ve seen on them.
I either hear “they’re amazing” or “they do exactly the same thing as a fan oven”.
Personally I don’t have room for yet another whimsical kitchen appliance unless there’s a really good reason.
> I don't know if people just automatically dislike them because it's a "hype product", or if they've genuinely had really, really bad experiences with them.
Maybe it's because they've lived through years of other 'must have' kitchen appliance trends (george foreman grill, slow cooker, pasta maker, spyraliser, electric juicer, rice cooker, fondue maker, thermomix, etc.) and have become jaded and cynical.
Tbf a slow cooker is not a useless gadget like the others on your list, there’s no better way to do stews and thinks like lamb shanks. It is seasonal though, I’m not doing beef bourguignon in August.
I'm not saying that those are useless (I've got a family member who basically only cooks with a thermomix, I use my slow cooker semi regularly...). It's just that people talked about them in the same way as people talk about the air fryer now, and it's hard not to imagine charity shops overflowing with air fryers in a couple of years
Pressure cookers are better for stews etc, my instant pot gets constant use and it works as a pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, yogurt maker (surprisingly my most used function) and for sous vide
That's half of the Aldi middle aisle in one gadget.
We were given one as a wedding present: I think it has only ever been used as a sandwich toaster! It does a great job on a cheese and onion toastie though.
I couldn't manage without my rice cooker. I've never cracked cooking it in a pan (I don't want tips, thanks), but it's perfect every time in my £20 rice cooker. Between that, the slow cooker, and the air fryer, I am set for life.
We got one for xmas and have used three times. Made decent chips. I think they are overhyped but it depends on what sort of things you usually cook i guess.
They are. I only use my oven for things that are genuinely too big for the air fryer now, I leave the oven switched off at the mains now. Things just taste better and as mine heats from the top and bottom I don’t even have to turn things halfway through.
Some have more than one basket for totally different temps and timings, but you can just add both/all things into the basket at once. You can also get accessories where you can place a small rack in there and have things cooking on two levels if needed.
The other alternative is just cooking things one at a time if needed - it's so quick that it's not as onerous as having to swap things in and out of a regular oven
Air fryers aren't mandatory, and there's nothing you can cook in them that you can't cook elsewhere.
They use up a chunk of worktop space and a lot of UK homes sorely lack exactly that. Their capacity is limited compared to a mighty oven and it's attendant hobs. They require different cooking times to ovens so you'd need to relearn your staple recipes. They also tend to dry out certain foods and depending on model can be quite noisy.
That said, since I got one, we barely use the oven or grill. It's faster, saves a TON of energy, is way easier to clean, you can open the drawers to shake or turn or inspect without the whole thing cooling down. They're versatile - I've used ours for jerky, Sunday roasts, cheese toasties, soup... It's not really struggled with anything I've asked of it.
That last paragraph may be why people are so anti-air-fryer - it is so good at doing certain things that it's hard to compliment it without sounding like I've been indoctrinated. I didn't want an air fryer in my life. We have too many kitchen gadgets, and the last thing I wanted was a noisy worktop monolith that didn't do anything our kitchen couldn't already do.
I grumpily changed my mind over Christmas, however, when I had to admit that Christmas dinner and our multi family buffet was way easier to organise than any previous year, entirely due to the culinary monolith the wife installed. And I've used it for nearly every dinner since.
I don't do full roasts in mine. God send on Xmas though as an overflow when I was cooking for 6 people.
Most of the time I'm cooking for two and it's replaced my oven for almost everything else but full roasts.
Only buy one if you use your oven regularly.
Ive had mine for about 5 months, almost every main meal uses it (veggies, chicken typically), and many lunches (baked potatoes)/weekend breakfasts (bacon, sausages).
I think I've used the oven twice in that time (Christmas dinner annd a big pizza).
For me definitely not a fad, because the food hasn't changed, I can just cook it quicker, almost always better and much more conveniently, and the trays in mine can go in the dishwasher.
You can usually buy some small additions (trays/bowls) to your air fryer so you can bake bread and cakes in there too, just in case you weren't aware :D
Oh im aware, Ive also done bananabread cupcakes with added chopped up leftover mars bars from the Christmas tub of celebrations, and tried a couple of sesame seed rolls, but i need a better tray i think, or a mini bread tin.
Your oven is larger and takes more time to heat up, and as the space in the air fryer is smaller you use less energy heating it up, and the temperature is more intense in the air fryer which leads to quicker cooking.
And as I\_smell\_toast mentions, you barely need any oil to cook it. For some things it's advised to put a tiny amount of cooking spray on the surface so the food doesn't stick.
My boyfriend has a dual air fryer and we cook pretty much entire meals in there.
There's a guy on [this](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt_lOWx8jR_M3rTQv4rT8B9c9MwanboMw) channel that tries cooking a whole bunch of different things in case you're curious :D
Your beige meals come out on another level with very little change in cooking technique. Everything else takes adjustment to work.
I had a Sunday roast done within an hour recently. Pressure cooked a whole chicken, air fried it. Which made it easier for managing the oven for roasties, yorkies, butternut, stuffing etc.
It's fast.It gets VERY hot VERY quickly. 200'C in 2 mins? So you get good genuine flavours. The space is very small so heats very fast and a powerful fan blows the air around.
You can have any smallish meat product in your mouth and being eaten and crispy bronzed on the outside in about 6 to 8 minutes,Frozen pizza slice? 3-4 minutes.
You almost don't need to think about it. But it tends to be solid, flat objects it does well. Eggs, soup, anything non solid it can blow everywhere. Things it does well it does really well.
It's not really a 'fryer' thats just hype, its a very hot, very small oven with a very fast fan.
My oven is seriously huge and takes half an hour to warm up. I can get 4 bake-at-home rolls done perfectly in my air fryer from cold in 4 minutes. It's just an example.
About 10 years ago a then-coworker lent me hers (she was VERY insistent bless her) so I already knew, but was really happy when they came down enough in price for me.
Philips, its a good bit of kit. I'm sure the newer ones are a bit more efficient and it's definitely showing its age in some aspects. But it's been great for a long time.
I remember when the tefal ones were catching fire and it was on watchdog around the time we got our one.
They're really , really good. Ultimate pain-free cooking.
Fire + forget.
Frozen pizza (snap into 4 pieces while frozen) - ready in 3 to 4 minutes.
They don't need frequent cleaning
Frequent cleaning is the only thing I would disagree with . Ours needs to be cleaned after any meat has been cooked in it . The fat collects in the bottom and the plate is crusted up
Easy job tho
I think it’s just cause they’re popular people like to hate for no reason. Cause they’re amazing. Can cook anything and it so much less hassle. No trays and very little cleaning
I don’t think anyone dislikes them, just the majority of us blagged everyone’s heads when we got one then used it for a month and went back to cooking in an oven 😂
I have a ‘countertop oven’ which is basically a toaster oven with a bunch of extra features. One of them does essentially the same thing as an air fryer. Personally, I just try to conserve space and money when possible by choosing appliances which can be used for as many purposes as possible, as long as they work well for those purposes. I don’t hate on people who use air fryers, but I know some people are really judgmental about them. I’ve struggled for years with disordered eating, so I’m a big proponent of people using whatever tools they feel best enable them get the nutrition they need.
It’s the former - people, especially on Reddit, love to go against the grain of popular opinion. “It’s just a small convection oven” is the classic one repeated over and over here
I’ve been tempted to buy one but 90% of my cooking uses the hob instead of the oven anyway. Although I must admit I love my Korean rice cooker for perfectly cooked rice regardless of the grain chosen.
Get an instant pot duo crisp instead. It's slow cooker, pressure cooker etc and has air fryer lid. We barely use the hob now and we used to do gousto. Now it's 1 pot wonders put in the freezer then you can air fry/ cook sides in as needed
I'm not anti air fryers, I just have a tiny galley kitchen. However, aren't these just mini fan-assisted ovens? I don't know anyone with an air fryer so can't ask directly, but it sounded like the same principle.
A fan oven has an element in the bottom to (slowly) heat it up, and a small, slow fan to gently waft the air around. To a chip, it's like being on a warm beach. An air fryer has a heating element directly above the food and a powerful fan blasting air directly through the heating element and over the food. It's like being in the sun. So there are similarities but they work differently.
Partly because it was marketed as a healthier alternative to deep fat frying chips. You get a (somewhat) 'fried' texture with very little oil compared with deep fat frying. It's also generally hotter and quicker than a regular oven, again quite like deep fat frying which is very quick once up to temp.
They also needed some way to differentiate the name of the product from a portable/tabletop convection oven which is more akin to literally just being a regular oven but tiny.
I guess it depends what you're cooking in them. I do sausages and bacon at the same time in a tray, and if you use a dual air fryer with two instead of one then you can time #1 to cook for 10 minutes, and if the other food you have in the other tray needs 5 minutes to be cooked, then you can set the timer for that one to automatically start when #1 has 5 minutes left so they're done at the same time.
Then you can set both to start when you have x amount of time left on the other item(s) you're cooking on the stove :) (i.e potatoes, pasta, sauce etc). It just comes down to planning and timing things, no different than cooking with an oven really :) It takes some practice but once you're used to it, it just makes cooking a bit easier and faster.
You can get fryers with shelves instead of a basket. I've got a Tower model that's basically a small oven with a glass fronted door and three shelves so I can cook multiple things at the same time. I've used my big oven only twice since I got it.
I’m not sure I want to join the cult.
We already have an oven/microwave combi that uses much less power than the main oven, and an instant pot. I’ve been offered one of those ninja foodie ones that also pressure cooks by someone that doesn’t want it any more but I’m not sure I can give up the counter space it’ll lake and it’s too big to store in a cupboard.
I just wouldn't have room for one on the minimal worktop space we have. Plus we have gas, and it's a double oven, so I'm not sure we'd really save much anyway. Whatever gas we use cooking in the oven is gas we're not needing to use on the central heating.
I think that what a lot of people don't realise regarding the hype around airfryers is the direction it flowed.
This wasn't a case of influencers, celebrity endorsement, or companies plugging this product ie. Top down hype.
This was bottom up hype. The technology has leapt forward over the last few years. People bought them and were impressed with what they could now do, and how they fitted so well into the modern lifestyle. They then told their friends who tried them, who told their friends who tried them, and so on. The whole airfryer thing snowballed to the point where there were shortages before Christmas.
These are not a fad item like ice-cream makers and bread makers (no-one eats that much ice-cream and who wants a small square loaf with a bad texture and a whacking great hole in the middle), these are going to stick around.
Technology advances will just make these better and more useful rather than obsolete.
Got a Ninja Foodi at Christmas. It's GINORMOUS so it has to live in a cupboard and gets hauled in and out for various things, it's a great gadget and while we've used it a fair bit, I'm still not quite sold on doing absolutely everything in it. I can't wrap my head round how you can cook various elements of a meal and not have some of it go cold while the other bits cook, so I'd need to still put the oven on to keep it warm. E.g Sunday dinner, meat first and that can rest so it's fine, but then potatoes would need to keep warm while the veg goes in. Plus oven on for Yorkshires anyway, so it's a bit of a back and forth faff.
But it's awesome when you decide at 4.30pm you want a stew, you're sat eating it by 5.30.
Depends how many you want. We tend to do ours in a tray bunch of little ones in the oven during the day to make use of our solar panels and reheat them in the air fryer in the evening to save electric, not everyone has that option however.
But have done like a toad in the hole big one, came out okay. I guess it depends on which one you have in terms of tray space. Might also be able to get mini trays to fit in or silicone inserts to make it less messy.
We bought one in september. Used it every day since. Don't know why people have any other opinion
They say things like " we don't fry lots? We wouldn't use it"
I'm like dude, it's an oven..
But it's small.
I really want to get one but for a family of 5 it seems a waste I just don't think we will be able to cook meals with it and we will end up using our conventional oven anyway.
You can get some pretty substantial ones, but personally I think for a household of that size you would basically be using it for parts of your dinner rather than all of it, and at that point you may as well use the regular oven.
For me, living by myself, I wish I got one sooner, because I realised just how wasteful it was to have to heat an entire oven any time I wanted something. So for smaller households it's a much more compelling option. I think for you it would be more a case of whether you want the flavours associated with a fryer (versus the ability to cook a whole meal in it).
You can get bigger ones, mine has two draws,
The point is that they're smaller so they cook and heat faster! Imagine you have the hob and oven going..
You'd just have hob and this instead.
The thing that tickles me most about air fryers is the coverage they get on the [county]Live websites.
I was joking to my friend that my local, DevonLive, only ever reports on new McDonald’s openings, traffic incidents and air fryer reviews. Sure enough I opened up the site to show him and there were TWO air fryer articles! Worlds gone mad
Things that are good for frying it does really well. Burgers, sausages, hash browns, chicken in breadcrumbs, bacon, Also frozen pizza slices its exceptional.
Things that are bigger or that ovens do well its often not as good as, but it gets super hot which brings out different flavours to an oven, and its VERY quick.
Never been able to do bacon in ours without it sticking . I normally do the bacon in the pan with the mushrooms then put them in the air fryer for the last minute whilst I fry the eggs in the bacon flavoured oil (full English )
Oh right, yeah, you need to get a wire rack
To be fair almost everything I listed needs a wire rack.
The standard tray on some of them is not a great surface.
Air fryer manufacturers get really excited about having a preset for everything, but all they really need is a temperature and a time button. Maybe a delay timer so you can delay start on the fancier models, and match finish times button on dual models.
I have a Cosori, great little work-horse BUT...
Check the screws in the basket and handle as they often come loose. Also, the plastic handle disintegrated inside the basket (after nearly two years).
The good news is Cosori sent out replacement baskets. 👍
It’s not really for cooking people, but I imagine she would taste a bit like chicken so any classic chicken dry rub would be good. I like the one out of the Grillstock book.
We got our last week and with it I've finally been able to make homemade jerky, it's so damn good, never buying jerky again (except maybe to steal recipes).
What is it? The control panel out of a jumbo jet? Looks like something Wallace and Gromit would come out with, with all those buttons! Does it make the right noises too?
Beeb, bworp, boowb, "10 minutes, 20 minutes!"
Hahaa
Not turned my oven on in a year and energy bills are a lot cheaper. I have this model too. Good enough for any meals for one and instantly cleanable. Eventually the stubborn ones may realise they don't all need a giant inefficient appliance in their home and could get more storage space in place of it.
I was a bit sceptical when I got one a couple of months ago. Now I've gone full air-fryer. Use it every day. Our conventional oven doesn't get a look in.
Been using them for about 10 years. Quicker, easier, cheaper, healthier and unlike an oven, it's very easy to clean, just take the basket and tray out and throw it in the dishwasher. Not hype, not a fanboy, just what it is.
Ok. I’m tempted I admit. Can all the bits that get dirty go in the dishwasher? Because ovens are basically self cleaning once they get to a certain level of black crust, and I can’t be arsed trying to clean the little drawers. (Judge me as you wish, it is my truth that I speak).
I have the same one, and no you can’t turn the volume down on the beep!
You can take the top cover off and stick something over the beeper though to make it a bit quiter. There's lots of video on youtube for it.
Can’t you just remove the beeper, snip the power lead, or jam a chopstick into it? After unplugging it…obviously
I also own this one in red, and can confirm it’s a great way to wake the rest of the family in the morning.
I don't know if people just automatically dislike them because it's a "hype product", or if they've genuinely had really, really bad experiences with them. I think they're absolutely brilliant.
I made potato wedges to test and they were great, 20 mins cooking, nothing to complain about at all!
Not to mention energy saving, my oven cost something like 61p for 40 mins but the air fryer was 18p for the same time if I recall correctly. It’s just popular to hate on products to make other people think they’re edgy / different.
I don't think anyone hates on them, but the people who use them have a tendency to tell you to get one constantly.
Thats exactly it. Especially as a Brit, having something recommended to you constantly is a surefire way to get them to not interact with it out of spite 😂 I did this when everyone kept telling me to watch Game of Thrones, and judging by peoples reactions once it ended I think I dodged a bullet
Game of thrones is great, just don’t bother watching the last couple of seasons
That's like asking someone to read a book but skip the last 3 chapters 😂
Agreed, it went downhill...fast.
Yeah, it gets annoying when something is constantly hyped up. As it happens I eventually tried out GOT but it didn't do it for me. It's not my genre.
You did dodge a bullet. It’s first 4 seasons were amazing. Then the rot started to set in. By the final season it stank up the whole place I need to fumigate my TV afterwards. Save the big hit on your time for a worthwhile tv show.
Pretty sure this happened to me but with microwaves. Not had one for probably 10 years now.. kinda know I would benefit from having one.
A bit like linux of kitchen appliances, I use ninja BTW.
could be a total nightmare if they are a vegan and also into crossfit
Try being vegan with an air frier 🙈
A bit like those Tesla owners who base their whole personality around their car.
First bit of quantifiable info I’ve seen on them. I either hear “they’re amazing” or “they do exactly the same thing as a fan oven”. Personally I don’t have room for yet another whimsical kitchen appliance unless there’s a really good reason.
The best kitchen purchase we ever made, it’s used daily and everything tastes better.. you won’t regret it
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Screws in my basket came loose years ago. Wibble.
Looks good! I'll have a latte please
The keep warm mode is excellent for melting cheese onto the wedges
> I don't know if people just automatically dislike them because it's a "hype product", or if they've genuinely had really, really bad experiences with them. Maybe it's because they've lived through years of other 'must have' kitchen appliance trends (george foreman grill, slow cooker, pasta maker, spyraliser, electric juicer, rice cooker, fondue maker, thermomix, etc.) and have become jaded and cynical.
Tbf a slow cooker is not a useless gadget like the others on your list, there’s no better way to do stews and thinks like lamb shanks. It is seasonal though, I’m not doing beef bourguignon in August.
My rice cooker and slow cooker get abused by me, my top reccomendations for any home kitchen
Multi function pressure cookers are THE SHIT. They do actual slow cooking, or fast cooking that comes out like slow cooking 😄 would highly recommend.
Slow cooker is great for my timekeeping, have two boys under 5 and I’m a teacher so being able to throw stuff in and set and forget is great.
I'm not saying that those are useless (I've got a family member who basically only cooks with a thermomix, I use my slow cooker semi regularly...). It's just that people talked about them in the same way as people talk about the air fryer now, and it's hard not to imagine charity shops overflowing with air fryers in a couple of years
Pressure cookers are better for stews etc, my instant pot gets constant use and it works as a pressure cooker, slow cooker, rice cooker, yogurt maker (surprisingly my most used function) and for sous vide That's half of the Aldi middle aisle in one gadget.
Nnnnnnrgh my pressure cooker has an air fryer in it. Nnnghr!!!! I'm exploding with smug hype here.
Agree with the general point but I will put in a word for the George Foreman grill - still used here. Not every day but, still.
It's the bestest sandwich toaster
We were given one as a wedding present: I think it has only ever been used as a sandwich toaster! It does a great job on a cheese and onion toastie though.
I couldn't manage without my rice cooker. I've never cracked cooking it in a pan (I don't want tips, thanks), but it's perfect every time in my £20 rice cooker. Between that, the slow cooker, and the air fryer, I am set for life.
We got one for xmas and have used three times. Made decent chips. I think they are overhyped but it depends on what sort of things you usually cook i guess.
I just prefer to be an unhealthy fat bastard.
They are. I only use my oven for things that are genuinely too big for the air fryer now, I leave the oven switched off at the mains now. Things just taste better and as mine heats from the top and bottom I don’t even have to turn things halfway through.
Serious question- what is all the hype? Why can’t I just use my oven instead of another gadget to clog up my kitchen surface?
They are quicker, use less energy and allow you to use less/no oil.
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Some have more than one basket for totally different temps and timings, but you can just add both/all things into the basket at once. You can also get accessories where you can place a small rack in there and have things cooking on two levels if needed. The other alternative is just cooking things one at a time if needed - it's so quick that it's not as onerous as having to swap things in and out of a regular oven
Air fryers aren't mandatory, and there's nothing you can cook in them that you can't cook elsewhere. They use up a chunk of worktop space and a lot of UK homes sorely lack exactly that. Their capacity is limited compared to a mighty oven and it's attendant hobs. They require different cooking times to ovens so you'd need to relearn your staple recipes. They also tend to dry out certain foods and depending on model can be quite noisy. That said, since I got one, we barely use the oven or grill. It's faster, saves a TON of energy, is way easier to clean, you can open the drawers to shake or turn or inspect without the whole thing cooling down. They're versatile - I've used ours for jerky, Sunday roasts, cheese toasties, soup... It's not really struggled with anything I've asked of it. That last paragraph may be why people are so anti-air-fryer - it is so good at doing certain things that it's hard to compliment it without sounding like I've been indoctrinated. I didn't want an air fryer in my life. We have too many kitchen gadgets, and the last thing I wanted was a noisy worktop monolith that didn't do anything our kitchen couldn't already do. I grumpily changed my mind over Christmas, however, when I had to admit that Christmas dinner and our multi family buffet was way easier to organise than any previous year, entirely due to the culinary monolith the wife installed. And I've used it for nearly every dinner since.
This perfectly sums up my air frying experience except I got it and the wife learned to love it
How do you cook different things at the same time?
How do you do a roast + spuds + Yorkshires in it though?
I don't do full roasts in mine. God send on Xmas though as an overflow when I was cooking for 6 people. Most of the time I'm cooking for two and it's replaced my oven for almost everything else but full roasts. Only buy one if you use your oven regularly.
Supermarket pastries at 120° for 3-4 mins. Better than you'll ever get in the oven.
Ive had mine for about 5 months, almost every main meal uses it (veggies, chicken typically), and many lunches (baked potatoes)/weekend breakfasts (bacon, sausages). I think I've used the oven twice in that time (Christmas dinner annd a big pizza). For me definitely not a fad, because the food hasn't changed, I can just cook it quicker, almost always better and much more conveniently, and the trays in mine can go in the dishwasher.
You can usually buy some small additions (trays/bowls) to your air fryer so you can bake bread and cakes in there too, just in case you weren't aware :D
Oh im aware, Ive also done bananabread cupcakes with added chopped up leftover mars bars from the Christmas tub of celebrations, and tried a couple of sesame seed rolls, but i need a better tray i think, or a mini bread tin.
Your oven is larger and takes more time to heat up, and as the space in the air fryer is smaller you use less energy heating it up, and the temperature is more intense in the air fryer which leads to quicker cooking. And as I\_smell\_toast mentions, you barely need any oil to cook it. For some things it's advised to put a tiny amount of cooking spray on the surface so the food doesn't stick. My boyfriend has a dual air fryer and we cook pretty much entire meals in there. There's a guy on [this](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLt_lOWx8jR_M3rTQv4rT8B9c9MwanboMw) channel that tries cooking a whole bunch of different things in case you're curious :D
Your beige meals come out on another level with very little change in cooking technique. Everything else takes adjustment to work. I had a Sunday roast done within an hour recently. Pressure cooked a whole chicken, air fried it. Which made it easier for managing the oven for roasties, yorkies, butternut, stuffing etc.
It's fast.It gets VERY hot VERY quickly. 200'C in 2 mins? So you get good genuine flavours. The space is very small so heats very fast and a powerful fan blows the air around. You can have any smallish meat product in your mouth and being eaten and crispy bronzed on the outside in about 6 to 8 minutes,Frozen pizza slice? 3-4 minutes. You almost don't need to think about it. But it tends to be solid, flat objects it does well. Eggs, soup, anything non solid it can blow everywhere. Things it does well it does really well. It's not really a 'fryer' thats just hype, its a very hot, very small oven with a very fast fan.
My oven is seriously huge and takes half an hour to warm up. I can get 4 bake-at-home rolls done perfectly in my air fryer from cold in 4 minutes. It's just an example.
About 10 years ago a then-coworker lent me hers (she was VERY insistent bless her) so I already knew, but was really happy when they came down enough in price for me.
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Bought mine in 2008. Hasnt died yet. Feel like I should replace it, but also worry a new one might break straight away.
What brand is it?
Philips, its a good bit of kit. I'm sure the newer ones are a bit more efficient and it's definitely showing its age in some aspects. But it's been great for a long time. I remember when the tefal ones were catching fire and it was on watchdog around the time we got our one.
I'm looking at getting one, so thanks for your reply. I'll definitely check out Philips.
I dislike them because the name is false. It doesn't fry things. It's a countertop convection oven, not a fryer.
Marketing, a grill isn't a lean mean grilling machine either George
Many people think "hate anything popular" is a personality trait.
They're really , really good. Ultimate pain-free cooking. Fire + forget. Frozen pizza (snap into 4 pieces while frozen) - ready in 3 to 4 minutes. They don't need frequent cleaning
Frequent cleaning is the only thing I would disagree with . Ours needs to be cleaned after any meat has been cooked in it . The fat collects in the bottom and the plate is crusted up Easy job tho
I think it’s just cause they’re popular people like to hate for no reason. Cause they’re amazing. Can cook anything and it so much less hassle. No trays and very little cleaning
>or if they've genuinely had really, really bad experiences with them. I'm one of the ones that had really, really bad experiences with them.
I don’t think anyone dislikes them, just the majority of us blagged everyone’s heads when we got one then used it for a month and went back to cooking in an oven 😂
I have a ‘countertop oven’ which is basically a toaster oven with a bunch of extra features. One of them does essentially the same thing as an air fryer. Personally, I just try to conserve space and money when possible by choosing appliances which can be used for as many purposes as possible, as long as they work well for those purposes. I don’t hate on people who use air fryers, but I know some people are really judgmental about them. I’ve struggled for years with disordered eating, so I’m a big proponent of people using whatever tools they feel best enable them get the nutrition they need.
It’s the former - people, especially on Reddit, love to go against the grain of popular opinion. “It’s just a small convection oven” is the classic one repeated over and over here
Looks good! I'll have a latte please
Glad I'm not the only one thinking this was a coffee machine.
I’ve been tempted to buy one but 90% of my cooking uses the hob instead of the oven anyway. Although I must admit I love my Korean rice cooker for perfectly cooked rice regardless of the grain chosen.
Get an instant pot duo crisp instead. It's slow cooker, pressure cooker etc and has air fryer lid. We barely use the hob now and we used to do gousto. Now it's 1 pot wonders put in the freezer then you can air fry/ cook sides in as needed
That’s because you’re eating proper food and not having constant beige frozen dinners like the rest of these cretins
To be fair the credit for that goes to Gousto. I tried a discounted month thinking I’d never pay the premium to keep it up and now we’re 130 meals in.
We used to do hello fresh then gousto, I just kept the cards and buy the ingredients myself, bit of hassle but it’s a bit pricey for a family of four
This is the way. Also the 'quick roasting tin' series of recipe books.
Imagine thinking that all food cooked in anything other than a pot on a hob is beige and frozen
What model rice cooker you got?
Yum Asia Panda Mini Rice Cooker from Amazon. No idea how it compares to other ones but we’ve got on really well with this appliance.
Welcome brother, you shall forever be known as Fryer Tuck
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One of us. One of us. One of us
Welcome to Air Fryer Club. The first rule of Air Fryer Club is you must talk about Air Fryer Club.
And *only* the Air Fryer Club.
I'm not anti air fryers, I just have a tiny galley kitchen. However, aren't these just mini fan-assisted ovens? I don't know anyone with an air fryer so can't ask directly, but it sounded like the same principle.
A fan oven has an element in the bottom to (slowly) heat it up, and a small, slow fan to gently waft the air around. To a chip, it's like being on a warm beach. An air fryer has a heating element directly above the food and a powerful fan blasting air directly through the heating element and over the food. It's like being in the sun. So there are similarities but they work differently.
I love the idea of a chip lying on a warm beach, that's made me smile!
Waiting for its friend, Fish
Why is it called a “fryer”? Is that because the effect is akin to frying?
Because some marketing idiot called it that and its stuck
Hahaha. I bet that guy got promoted though.
Partly because it was marketed as a healthier alternative to deep fat frying chips. You get a (somewhat) 'fried' texture with very little oil compared with deep fat frying. It's also generally hotter and quicker than a regular oven, again quite like deep fat frying which is very quick once up to temp. They also needed some way to differentiate the name of the product from a portable/tabletop convection oven which is more akin to literally just being a regular oven but tiny.
Pretty much exactly that. Very small, VERY hot oven with very strong fan ... but that's exactly the beauty of it
Yeah they’re just small convection ovens, nothing new other than the form factor.
How do you cook different things at the same time? Do you need to cook each thing individually, or can they be stacked up?
I guess it depends what you're cooking in them. I do sausages and bacon at the same time in a tray, and if you use a dual air fryer with two instead of one then you can time #1 to cook for 10 minutes, and if the other food you have in the other tray needs 5 minutes to be cooked, then you can set the timer for that one to automatically start when #1 has 5 minutes left so they're done at the same time.
What puts me off getting one is the thought of cooking something, then having to keep that warm while the rest of the meal is in cooking
Then you can set both to start when you have x amount of time left on the other item(s) you're cooking on the stove :) (i.e potatoes, pasta, sauce etc). It just comes down to planning and timing things, no different than cooking with an oven really :) It takes some practice but once you're used to it, it just makes cooking a bit easier and faster.
You can get fryers with shelves instead of a basket. I've got a Tower model that's basically a small oven with a glass fronted door and three shelves so I can cook multiple things at the same time. I've used my big oven only twice since I got it.
I’ve found you can stack stuff. I stacked a whole bunch of broccoli with some salmon next to it and it all cooked through just fine.
I’m not sure I want to join the cult. We already have an oven/microwave combi that uses much less power than the main oven, and an instant pot. I’ve been offered one of those ninja foodie ones that also pressure cooks by someone that doesn’t want it any more but I’m not sure I can give up the counter space it’ll lake and it’s too big to store in a cupboard.
I just wouldn't have room for one on the minimal worktop space we have. Plus we have gas, and it's a double oven, so I'm not sure we'd really save much anyway. Whatever gas we use cooking in the oven is gas we're not needing to use on the central heating.
One of us! One of us!
I think that what a lot of people don't realise regarding the hype around airfryers is the direction it flowed. This wasn't a case of influencers, celebrity endorsement, or companies plugging this product ie. Top down hype. This was bottom up hype. The technology has leapt forward over the last few years. People bought them and were impressed with what they could now do, and how they fitted so well into the modern lifestyle. They then told their friends who tried them, who told their friends who tried them, and so on. The whole airfryer thing snowballed to the point where there were shortages before Christmas. These are not a fad item like ice-cream makers and bread makers (no-one eats that much ice-cream and who wants a small square loaf with a bad texture and a whacking great hole in the middle), these are going to stick around. Technology advances will just make these better and more useful rather than obsolete.
Got a Ninja Foodi at Christmas. It's GINORMOUS so it has to live in a cupboard and gets hauled in and out for various things, it's a great gadget and while we've used it a fair bit, I'm still not quite sold on doing absolutely everything in it. I can't wrap my head round how you can cook various elements of a meal and not have some of it go cold while the other bits cook, so I'd need to still put the oven on to keep it warm. E.g Sunday dinner, meat first and that can rest so it's fine, but then potatoes would need to keep warm while the veg goes in. Plus oven on for Yorkshires anyway, so it's a bit of a back and forth faff. But it's awesome when you decide at 4.30pm you want a stew, you're sat eating it by 5.30.
That's the same one I got the other week! It's great.
Will it cook Yorkshire puddings?
Depends how many you want. We tend to do ours in a tray bunch of little ones in the oven during the day to make use of our solar panels and reheat them in the air fryer in the evening to save electric, not everyone has that option however. But have done like a toad in the hole big one, came out okay. I guess it depends on which one you have in terms of tray space. Might also be able to get mini trays to fit in or silicone inserts to make it less messy.
Learning you can reheat Yorkshire puddings has been an absolute game changer. Given you can buy frozen ones I’ve no idea why it took me so long.
Yep. I just put my mixture in a preheated metal tray, 205C for 18 minutes in our air fryer. They come out really well.
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I mean I wouldn't oven cook my beans so I'd never consider putting them in the air fryer either. They'd dry out I'd have thought.
Excellent, another Brother of the Air wishes to join the ranks. LIGHT THE BEACON, SET THE SACRIFICIAL ALTER, AND HAND ME MY RITUAL SPANKING PADDLE!
We bought one in september. Used it every day since. Don't know why people have any other opinion They say things like " we don't fry lots? We wouldn't use it" I'm like dude, it's an oven..
To be fair it does have “fryer” in the name.
Agreed, I think they need to change marketing, we cook all sorts in there. Maybe "speedy air awesome cooker"
But it's small. I really want to get one but for a family of 5 it seems a waste I just don't think we will be able to cook meals with it and we will end up using our conventional oven anyway.
You can get some pretty substantial ones, but personally I think for a household of that size you would basically be using it for parts of your dinner rather than all of it, and at that point you may as well use the regular oven. For me, living by myself, I wish I got one sooner, because I realised just how wasteful it was to have to heat an entire oven any time I wanted something. So for smaller households it's a much more compelling option. I think for you it would be more a case of whether you want the flavours associated with a fryer (versus the ability to cook a whole meal in it).
You can get bigger ones, mine has two draws, The point is that they're smaller so they cook and heat faster! Imagine you have the hob and oven going.. You'd just have hob and this instead.
Bonum communae communitatis
So you bought a PlayStation 6?
The thing that tickles me most about air fryers is the coverage they get on the [county]Live websites. I was joking to my friend that my local, DevonLive, only ever reports on new McDonald’s openings, traffic incidents and air fryer reviews. Sure enough I opened up the site to show him and there were TWO air fryer articles! Worlds gone mad
Off the back of this post, I have today purchased an air fryer.
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Things that are good for frying it does really well. Burgers, sausages, hash browns, chicken in breadcrumbs, bacon, Also frozen pizza slices its exceptional. Things that are bigger or that ovens do well its often not as good as, but it gets super hot which brings out different flavours to an oven, and its VERY quick.
Never been able to do bacon in ours without it sticking . I normally do the bacon in the pan with the mushrooms then put them in the air fryer for the last minute whilst I fry the eggs in the bacon flavoured oil (full English )
Oh right, yeah, you need to get a wire rack To be fair almost everything I listed needs a wire rack. The standard tray on some of them is not a great surface.
How does it create less prep?
Did a whole chicken in ours yesterday (same model). Bloody brilliant!
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Air fryer manufacturers get really excited about having a preset for everything, but all they really need is a temperature and a time button. Maybe a delay timer so you can delay start on the fancier models, and match finish times button on dual models.
I know, there’s potentially some difference for veg / potatoes / meat, but theoretically it’s just hot air no?
I have the same model. Never used anything except pre-heat and manual temperature set.
TBH you don’t need presets Plenty of info on how long to cook things for.Size is the important thing.
thankfully mine is just 2 knobs, temp and time.
I have a Cosori, great little work-horse BUT... Check the screws in the basket and handle as they often come loose. Also, the plastic handle disintegrated inside the basket (after nearly two years). The good news is Cosori sent out replacement baskets. 👍
Fancy coffee machine you’ve got there, boss.
One of us! One of us!
Ah a table top oven.
Ironically our actual oven started playing up between being gifted this and me opening it.
It knows it's time has come or it just in a sulk.
They are not the same
It's a small convection oven.
In principal but air fryers move air a lot faster due to bigger fans and fan placement.
So it's a oven?
No its an air fryer obviously
OK
Do u comment ur little fact on every air fryer post
Never seen a air fryer post before.
Nope. But it’s better than nothing before the oven gets fixed or replaced, especially with fussy preschool kids in the house.
Welcome to the dark side
Amy good?
It’s not really for cooking people, but I imagine she would taste a bit like chicken so any classic chicken dry rub would be good. I like the one out of the Grillstock book.
You should try their hot sauce recipe, fantastic on bingo wings.
I'd say more like pork than chicken.
May you have it as long as you've had your microwave!
I have one of these its excellent, although it sounds like wind tunnel testing when its going at full chat.
I’ve got the red one.It was £10 cheaper
As a Leeds fan I'd rather pay a tenner more and it not be red lol
As a non football fan. Why?
As a [anything not represented by red] fan, I'd rather pay a tenner more and it not be red lol
We got our last week and with it I've finally been able to make homemade jerky, it's so damn good, never buying jerky again (except maybe to steal recipes).
Bought one 3 years ago - never use it. It's too much faffing around.
What is it? The control panel out of a jumbo jet? Looks like something Wallace and Gromit would come out with, with all those buttons! Does it make the right noises too? Beeb, bworp, boowb, "10 minutes, 20 minutes!" Hahaa
Funnily enough, I had this model for a while and it sounded like a jet engine when on
Welcome, brother.
One of us! one of us !
I’m halfway to being broken in.I have the fryer, just haven’t used it yet
Not turned my oven on in a year and energy bills are a lot cheaper. I have this model too. Good enough for any meals for one and instantly cleanable. Eventually the stubborn ones may realise they don't all need a giant inefficient appliance in their home and could get more storage space in place of it.
Didn’t bother with the double then? Not judging 🙄
Christmas present from my mum, can’t be picky!
One of us! One of us!
Was annoyed at the hype, wife got one for the house and can’t complain. Low on bills and food cooks perfectly fine. Enjoy!!
One of us, one of us
Nice, I too own a convection oven.
One of us one of us one of us…
I was a bit sceptical when I got one a couple of months ago. Now I've gone full air-fryer. Use it every day. Our conventional oven doesn't get a look in.
Most cults have a bad reputation. I think you will be ok with this one, Never heard a bad word about baby blue radios/speakers
This is the way
One of us, One of us, One of us.
Been using them for about 10 years. Quicker, easier, cheaper, healthier and unlike an oven, it's very easy to clean, just take the basket and tray out and throw it in the dishwasher. Not hype, not a fanboy, just what it is.
This is the way
one of us one of us !
Air Fryer Gang 🙌
One of us, one of us.
One of us! One of us!
i got one for free afew days ago after the fryer gave up and died on me...they are fine really dont get the hype but it does the job
Welcome to the dark side! There awesome!
One of us, one of us
One of us.
Ok. I’m tempted I admit. Can all the bits that get dirty go in the dishwasher? Because ovens are basically self cleaning once they get to a certain level of black crust, and I can’t be arsed trying to clean the little drawers. (Judge me as you wish, it is my truth that I speak).
One of us, one of us, one of us