Author: Melissa Clark / Source: New York Times
David Malosh for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.
The golden promises of the air fryer were just too tempting to ignore.
Browned and crisp French fries, craggy chicken wings coated in hot sauce, breaded calamari that crunches audibly when you bite down — all without the unctuous mess, wafting odor and calorie count of deep-frying.
Home cooks celebrated the appliance not just for its faux-frying capabilities, but also for its ability to cook small amounts of food (potato wedges, broccoli spears, chicken) much faster than their regular ovens.Could air fryers really be the best kitchen innovation since my beloved electric pressure cooker, or is it all just too good to be true?
After extensive testing, my colleagues at Wirecutter, a product review site owned by The New York Times Company, panned the appliance as overhyped and overpriced. The Kitchn, a home-cooking website, firmly agreed with that assessment, while Cooking Light magazine reported uneven results.
The only way I’d find out if an air fryer was worth my precious counter space would be to try it for myself.
An air fryer is basically a shrunken countertop convection oven. Some models are smallish and egg-shaped, with a footprint similar to that of a coffee maker. Others resemble large toaster ovens, boasting a bevy of functions — roast, convection bake, toast, dehydrate, proof — in addition to air frying.
Like convection ovens, every model is equipped with high-speed fans to circulate hot air around your food. But air fryers blow air more forcefully and at hotter temperatures than regular convection, in an attempt to mimic the browning of deep-frying, using teaspoons of oil rather than cups.
If it sounds too good to be true, well, maybe it is.
Air fryers have been one of the fastest-growing items in the category of small home appliances since they were introduced in Europe in 2010. According to Joe Derochowski, the home-industry adviser at the NPD Group, a market research firm, nearly 10 million air fryers were sold in the United States from late May 2017 to mid-March 2019. He likened their growth to that of multicookers like the Instant Pot, of which about 13 million were sold in the same time period. And growth is accelerating over the past 12 months: Air fryer sales increased 69 percent, year over year, in 2018.
These numbers account only for stand-alone air fryers, and not countertop convection ovens with air-frying functions, like the Breville Smart Oven and the Cuisinart AirFryer Toaster Oven.
For my own testing, I chose a small (2.75-quart) free-standing model by Philips, the one recommended by Wirecutter, which wouldn’t require as much valuable counter space as some of the other models.
Then I set some parameters. I wanted to determine what the machine did best, not everything it was capable of, so I nixed the entire category of baking recipes. I also skipped frozen prepared products like French fries, breaded fish sticks and chicken nuggets: Since I was testing to see if the machine warranted a spot on my counter, I stuck to foods I wanted to eat.
That definitely does, however, include French fries made from fresh potatoes. I’ll happily devour a plate of extra-crisp, darkly browned fries as my dinner, along with a salad. Deep-frying French fries in the standard way is particularly messy, though, because you need to fry them at least twice for maximum crispness.
After air frying nearly a dozen batches using different techniques, I found that cooking them in stages at two different temperatures (350 degrees, then 400) yielded a solid…
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