Are Air Fryers Worth The Hype?

You look warily at the big box on the kitchen table containing an air fryer. They’re said to cook food with convection-like hot air instead of with cooking oils. Is all that healthy food worth not only the price but the hype?

What The Kitchen Testers Say About Air Fryers

Air fryers were introduced to the market in 2010. They were marketed as a healthier way of cooking. Instead of using unhealthy cooking oils like vegetable oil and canola oil, you’d be cooking with hot air. Why said the kitchen testing experts, do you need something that does the same thing any oven can do?

The small appliance isn’t necessarily small. It’s more the size of a five-gallon pail which necessitates moving something to accommodate it on the counter. The fan is a tad loud. You’d have to shout to be heard over it, the testers say.

The basket is too small to fit a normal-sized chicken, pot roast, or anything bigger than a burger. You could fit air fryer frozen french fries because that’s the first thing kitchen testers tested. They weren’t crisp or browned like they would be had they been deep-fried.

The “fried” chicken came out juicy, but you could only fit three pieces of chicken in the basket. The testers threw up their hands in disappointment and called it a day.

What Satisfied Users Say About Air Fryers

Now it’s the turn of the cooks who slave over stoves and ovens to feed their families. Okay, so the appliance takes up a bit of space. They’d take that overheating up the whole house with the oven any day of the week.

You can’t talk over the noise of the fan? Have you ever seen family members in a kitchen while food is being prepared? They’d be asked to do dishes or dice something. No one is going to risk that.

If you’re going to fry chicken, you can’t put more than three pieces in the deep fry basket at a time. A fried chicken dinner is going to take some time to prepare, so the argument that you can only place two to three pieces in the basket holds no water (or oil.)

The fact that anything solid, as opposed to anything liquid, can be cooked in an air fryer beats an oven or even a slow cooker in users’ opinion. Want french toast for breakfast? It’s done in about three minutes. Are hot dogs for lunch okay? They’ll come out with grill marks in maybe four minutes, and you can cook four at a time in an air fryer.

You can bake bread, although it’s 90-second keto bread in a microwave, in a ramekin. Regular homemade bread takes less than 30 minutes in an air fryer where it takes one hour in an oven. Okay, so you can only get four cookies in the basket. They cook in four minutes and taste incredible.

Are air fryers worth the hype? They are to most cooks. The healthy aspect isn’t so much important as the convenience, time-saving, and ease of cleanup to a cook.