BS: who owns an air fryer?

Subject: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: leeneia
Date: 05 May 19 - 10:03 PM

I have been reading about the cooking appliance called an air fryer. I realize that it is a small convection oven with a special shape. It looks handy.

Do you own one? Do you like it? What brand is it?

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 05 May 19 - 10:26 PM

I got one. the power air fryer.

very good if you're dieting. you can do chips without fat or oil.
it doesn't dry food like a microwave. quicker and less fuss than the oven.

i think they've made some improvements since i got mine.

ihaven't done any of the stuff in the recipe book.

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 05 May 19 - 10:39 PM

What shape? I've used a bowl-type convection oven for many years (the hot air is blown around from the lid, the "oven" is a large glass bowl it fits over.)

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: IanW
Date: 06 May 19 - 03:03 AM

We have one it’s brilliant. We use it constantly. Heats things up much faster than the electric oven. We used our first so much it’s warn out and we are now onto our second.

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: vectis
Date: 07 May 19 - 09:19 PM

I have just got one and it is brilliant. Frozen oven chips and roast spuds come out much moister than cooking them in an oven.

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 07 May 19 - 09:59 PM

And yet it IS an oven. Air fryer, humph. Oxymoron. Cooks with hot air = oven. Cooking with hot grease = frying.

But great marketing!

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: BobL
Date: 08 May 19 - 04:19 AM

So it's essentially a fan oven, only table-top size?

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Jos
Date: 08 May 19 - 06:32 AM

I cook oven chips in a deep fat fryer. Try it.

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 08 May 19 - 07:16 AM

Frozen oven chips are an abomination and are bad for you. Why bother. Instead:

Turn up the oven to at least 230C.

Scrub spuds but don't peel. "Salad potatoes" are the best, but at a pinch any spud will do.

Cut spuds into chip-sized bits.

Parboil for seven minutes in well-salted water.

Drain in a sieve and allow to stand for a couple of minutes uncovered.

Put back in pan, cover with lid and shake to roughen all the edges.

Spread chips out on an oven tray (overcrowding is disastrous) that has enough groundnut oil on it to coat the chips plus a little bit extra.

Place into hot oven for 20 minutes, tossing them around in the oil half way through.

Result: gorgeous healthy chips that haven't absorbed too much oil at all (a lot of it will still be in the tray when you've plated up the chips).

Recommended accompaniments: fried eggs or omelette with baked beans, or baked fish with mushy peas.

I'm not going to pretend that I've got chips when they've been made without any fat.

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Jos
Date: 08 May 19 - 08:09 AM

I used Sainsbury's Maris Piper chunky chips.
[Many other varieties are indeed covered by Steve Shaw's first sentence.]

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 08 May 19 - 06:49 PM

Your Sainsbury's chips ingredients:

Potato (91%), Wheat Flour, Sunflower Oil, Cornflour, Rice Flour, Salt

What place does flour occupy in a discussion of chips? Three kinds?...

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 08 May 19 - 06:50 PM

Sorry, last line shouldn't have been in italics.

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Jos
Date: 09 May 19 - 12:22 PM

I see your point - I assume it's to produce a crisp coating when cooked in an oven, where the chips are not immersed in fat.

(I'm not keen on baked beans, and I think mushy peas are vile. But eggs, omelette or baked fish are fine. I assumed the italics were for emphasis.)

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 09 May 19 - 01:21 PM

Fried eggs, chips and baked beans constitute manna from heaven. The baked beans may be replaced by black pudding and bacon. A hash brown (or, better, a rosti) and mushrooms are optional. Possibly a pork sausage. The grilled half-tomato oft included is not my idea of fun. I'll use large tomatoes, or tinned plum tomatoes, to make a sauce or soup. My idea of tomatoes as a side dish is to use the best quality cherry tomatoes you can get. Put them into a small baking tray with seasoning, extra virgin olive oil and a handful of torn basil leaves (if you have dried basil, throw it away, though you could use dried oregano). Coat the tomatoes then put into a hot oven for no more than four minutes. They keep their shape but they soften and release all their flavour. Superb with a steak or a home-made burger (which I make with minced steak and nothing else whatsoever: no egg, no seasoning, no mustard and definitely no onion; two and a half minutes per side in a very hot frying pan then a crucial ten minutes' resting).

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Jos
Date: 09 May 19 - 02:07 PM

I'm with you on the burger made with minced beef and nothing else. And with the bacon - I cook the mushrooms in the bacon fat.
Bacon and egg yolk is one of those combinations that seem to produce an extra, third flavour. Cheese and onion is another - like mixing blue and yellow and getting green.

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 09 May 19 - 02:30 PM

Agree with all that. The mushrooms often served in caffs or restaurants are all too often grey, thick, rubbery unseasoned abominations sitting in a little pool of rather nasty liquid. I like mine sliced thin, or hacked into smallish chunks, well seasoned and sautéed in hot butter or (as you say) bacon fat. A slice of bread then fried in the fat is very good. I use dried porcini soaking water and the finely-chopped porcini in casseroles and pot roasts, but I never use ordinary mushrooms for that, and I honestly can't see the point of button mushrooms. It's very disappointing when a stack of mushrooms I'm frying almost disappears in a pool of sludge in the frying pan. I've taken to buying the organic ones from Sainsbury's which never seem to do that.

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Murray MacLeod
Date: 09 May 19 - 05:14 PM

You appear to be quite the gourmet, Steve.

I have always thought that the finest chips (= French fries for our transatlantic cousins) were made using beef dripping. I cannot remember the actual temperatures, but you cook them for X minutes at the lower temp, to blanch, and then for Y minutes at the higher temp.

My understanding is that cooking chips this way is actually healthier than the chip shop method of deep frying in oil.

I do like your method of oven cooking the chips ... makes sense to me. I will definitely try that, and I look forward to any other culinary tips you choose to post on Mudcat.

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 09 May 19 - 08:28 PM

I agree about the beef dripping. When my mum had a chippie in the 1950s that's what she used. The Three Fishes at Whalley does chips that way, as does Rick Stein's chippie in Padstow.

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Jos
Date: 10 May 19 - 05:01 AM

Aren't French fries those thin straight things like long crispy matchsticks? Very different from chips made of potato chunks the size of your thumb with plenty of recognisable potato in the middle.

Don't some chip shops use the double frying method simply for convenience, having a supply of blanched, part cooked chips ready to fry quickly at a high temperature when needed?

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Jos
Date: 10 May 19 - 05:02 AM

And I should have added that when I fry my oven chips it is in beef dripping.

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 10 May 19 - 10:53 AM

Jos, those are matchstick [French] fries. Yon French fries can be thick or thin.

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: leeneia
Date: 11 May 19 - 12:44 PM

To get back to air fryers, here's a link to a video where the speaker mentions that her Zen air fryer gets so hot in the back that it melted the plastic plate over a wall outlet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYvsTBqJnU0

I'm interested in buying an air fryer, but not one with a quirk like that. That's why I asked catters what brand they own. I'd like to know if other brands have strange characteristics.

As I see it, an air fryer would cut fat in my diet, cut grease from spattering skillets, add less heat to the kitchen than an oven, and be easy to clean. (I believe that I would use it to cook meat, mostly.)

Do you catters who own one agree with that? What brand do you own?

Subject: RE: BS: who owns an air fryer?
From: G-Force
Date: 13 May 19 - 09:29 AM

You're right; chips are an abomination, but lovely. Our compromise is to only eat them on special occasions. However, I think oven chips are pretty dull so if we're going to have them they had better be good. We therefore add extra salt and oil and do them in the oven. All that grease may kill us but at our age we won't be dying young anymore!