I got given a slow cooker for Christmas a few years ago, have only ended up using it twice or so since… It’s actually the air fryer that really revolutionised my cooking, I use it almost every day.
I follow this recipe and cook for eight hours in the crock pot on low.
https://www.kcet.org/food-discovery/food/weekend-recipe-pull...
Double ovens are a thing but you rarely see apartments outfitted with those and if you already have an oven, air-fryer makes more sense than replacing single oven with double oven.
My air fryer has a toaster oven form factor[1]. The fan is much more powerful however and it has extra heating elements. Otherwise it literally is a toaster oven with convection, even says so in the name!
Conceptually all of these are very similar, it’s just the balance of heating power and fan speed that make the difference, though marginal it may be from an engineering design standpoint.
Typical air fryers have a basket design[2] that helps with splatter control, but they are otherwise again the same.
There's nothing about an air fryer that they couldn't have made them in the 50s. How did they take so long to exist??
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halogen_oven
[2] http://www.lamptech.co.uk/Spec%20Sheets/TH%20SP%20IR%20Thorn...
I know nothing of the technologies involved but I suspect the air fryer makes things easier because it's easier to get the desired effects in a small heating area (the basket) than the oven.
This means it’s under powered. On top of that, the temperature might be high but energy delivery is not. That means the temperature right around the items actually drops, like how being still in cold water creates a static layer of warm water that keeps you warmer than if you’re moving around in it. With fast moving air you get significantly more heat transfer.
This is what convection ovens do but those are under powered in both heat and air flow, for my use case. Enough that I don’t use them at all, while I use my air fryer multiple times daily. Mine actually has the form factor of a toaster oven, so it’s a very easy comparison.
It’s literally just a stronger version of a convection oven, with different marketing.
> reduce energy use
I’m not so sure. It takes my air fryer much less time to cook things, so without doing the numbers I can’t say which is more efficient. I’d say that’s more about cost.
An oven that takes longer to get to temperature is wasting energy, not using less, because of greater waste from losses to the surrounding environment.
Anyway, it's great for crisping things in a way that frying (deep or shallow) might otherwise do, but with very little oil required.
Examples - lightly cornflour'd chicken or pork to give a little crunch in sweet & sour pork / chicken. Butcher-prepared chicken kievs that would otherwise need a lot of oil and be a mess to cook. (Sweet) potato wedges, usually heavily herbed. These can be done with a a very light coating of oil, typically sprayed rather than tossed.
The carbohydrate aspect of these foods is a bigger concern to me than the oil, but nonetheless.
I do salmon fillets in it now instead of in the pan, or roasting up some chicken breast, even steak if you’re in a real hurry.
1. Buy an air fryer.
2. Try it a few times.
3. Tell everyone in the familiy, at the work place and on social media how awesome an air fryer is.
4. Never use it again.
The only ones for me that have survived the test of time are the pressure cooker and the toaster oven.
I finally found a second-hand air fryer, but they do seem scarce so far.