Show HN: AirFry.Pro – The best popular and healthy recipes for your air fryer | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: AirFry.Pro – The best popular and healthy recipes for your air fryer

airfry.pro

44 pointschrisdeweese49 comments

    Recipe of the day 
    Sriracha Maple Bacon

Is this the North American version of "healthy"?

I clicked on breakfast:

  - Sugar covered donuts  
  - Iced cinnamon rolls  
  - French toast  
  - Cinnamon roll bites  
  - Nutella Croissants

Healthy indeed.

"popular and healthy"... Those two sets are clearly reasonably disjoint!

I love my air fryer, and will probably bookmark this, but seeing a steak as one of the top recipes is blasphemy.

An air fryer is actually one of the best ways to make steak if you don't follow the prescribed recipe in the link, but if you reverse sear (a reliable and well-known technique, usually done with an oven, which an air fryer is).

If your steak is about 1.5" thick, you can airfry at 260ºF for 18 minutes, flip once. This raises the internal temperature uniformly to around 130ºF.

Then sear 1 minute per side and 30 secs on the sides, to get a crust. That's it.

(no resting needed because it's a reverse sear, the internal temperature is already where it's supposed to be for medium rare).

Tip: remember to pre-heat your air fryer per the instructions in the manual. A 260ºF pre-heat should only take 2 minutes.

> Then sear 1 minute per side and 30 secs on the sides, to get a crust. That's it.

How do you not have the entire house smell like sautéed steak / have oil + fat droplets splatter everywhere on the stove/floor?

Sear without oil. The steak itself should have enough fat (if it doesn’t your cut of steak might have too little marbling). Also searing for 2 minutes produces very little oil. Run your range hood fan.

The reverse sear technique produces little oil splatter. My air quality monitor barely spikes.

Use a splatter screen, in addition to an effective kitchen exhaust fan.

Run your kitchen exhaust fan, and wipe up after?

I cook steak in the air fryer alone. I don't even bother flipping. 14-16 mins depending on thickness and it comes out awesomely every time.

How do you prevent wetness on the bottom side if you don’t flip?

Also how do you get a thin crust?

Do you mean wetness as in the juices in the steak gravitate to the bottom? Or do you mean literally the bottom of the steak is wet? Either way neither of those issues seem to be a problem for me.

When I first started cooking in the air fryer I did flip it at half way though. I just forgot once and found it didn't make any perceptible difference, so gave up on it and it's just that one less task to do. My partner and I both agree it comes out awesome pretty much every time, and I'd say we are reasonably fussy steak eaters.

I don't worry about crust I guess? I don't think I even try to do that when I'm cooking them in a pan. I'm more interested in trying to get the fat right - it tends to crust over pretty nicely in the air fryer. It works better on thicker bits so it has longer in the heat.

Do you mean sear in a pan?

Yes, should have clarified that. Sear in a pan, not airfryer.

Why are people so against air frying steak? It seems like the best thing to cook in an air fryer

I'm not really against it if you like it, it was half a joke.

But to me steak cooking is an art of sorts that means searing the outside while minimally cooking the inside(I'm a rare steak guy). That usually means letting it thaw completely, then just searing the sides at super high heat, for me on a griddle or cast iron pan.

I've never tried to oven or air fry a steak, but I have to imagine you can't get anything close to a seared steak that's rare inside. We want to retain moisture, so blowing hot air at it seems like a bad idea.

I thought that way until I tried a reverse sear (oven at low temp and sear afterwards) myself. I am no expert at the physics behind it, but it works great for rare steaks.

Yes, the oven dries the outer part of the steak, but that means you get your desired crust in less time in the pan. That results in a clearer distinction between the crust and the juicy interior without the gray band in between.

If you want to get it rare with moisture retained with an air fryer, see above, decrease the time, and use parchment paper.

I'm inclined to try it. My current method is just a cast iron pan at highest heat and flipping three times total, but I'm willing to experiment.

Sous vide + hot sear is my preferred method - but the oven reverse sear is fairly similar and I don't doubt the air fryer would yield similar

For the same reason they’d probably be against baking a steak.

Ethics.

This is nice, but can you add filters for vegetarian/vegan food please?

[hint: they’re the same ones as for your oven]

It's no secret that air fryers work like a convection oven, but they're not at all the same. Air fryers in my experience are much, much faster to cook, and easier to clean. Perfect for one or two person meals really.

For example, I can get fries from frozen to on the verge of burning in 15 minutes with an air fryer. My oven isn't top of the line or anything, but would take at least twice as long, and probably waste a lot more energy in the process.

So if nothing else, the temp and timing info here would be key as they likely won't match typical oven recipes.

I kept hearing that "air fryers are just convection ovens" and was very confused, because I know air fryers use a fan. But it turns out Americans call fan ovens, the one type of oven that specifically does not rely on convection, "convection ovens". Another thing on my list of things Americans say that mean specifically the opposite.

It makes me wonder, do Americans take into account the fan when following recipes? Common wisdom is to lower the temperature by 10 degrees for a fan (assuming recipes are for a real convection oven). Or are all American recipes written for fans?

It's presumed generally that you don't, which is why I presume airfryers are so popular.

The vast majority of ovens in the US are not convection. So any recipe is written for a standard oven.

But, even convection ovens don't cook the same as an air fryer. Air fryers are like a mini turbo convection ovens. It's like comparing a camp fire to a blow torch.

They do rely on convection, just forced convection rather than natural.

One key difference is that they continually exhaust some of the air (unlike a conventional oven) so they are much better at lowering moisture content while cooking, which helps produce a crispy texture on things like fries.

Aaaah! That’s what it is.

The other great thing about an air fryer is that it allows for experimentation on timing.

You can easily open the door and check the doneness of the food, and if it's not quite there, add time.

With an oven, you lose heat (or heat up the entire apartment) if you keep opening the oven door.

Good point. They actually make see through air fryers now. I bought one as a backup but haven't used it yet, I'm interested to know if it'll just steam up and be useless or not.

https://www.walmart.com/ip/GOURMIA-8QT-AIRFRY-B/5456580426

I am the person saying "air fryers are just convection ovens (but faster)" a lot, so I am finding it is a secret that air frying isn't like frying.

There's more convection as they blow harder.

As always, Angry Dishwasher Man recently came out with a video about airfryers. Go check it out if you remain skeptical.

https://youtu.be/6h9JhW-m35o?si=OULBSSIPEvCY8_L2

I prefer to call him Angry Christmas Lights Man.

Same temperature, same product and vastly different result.

Technically the same, practically not.

I can do some of the most magnificent potatoes in an air frier, all that without a touch of oil.

Hey OP, I'm not sure if this is something you control or if it's a Vercel config thing, but when I try to share your website using iOS's share sheet it actually sends the direct link to your Vercel instance instead:

https://air-fry-abc-projects-xyz.vercel.app/

That link just asks the visitor to log in to what I assume is a control panel or something (I haven't used Vercel).

Protip is to use frozen steak in an air fryer if you want a reasonable crust, though I still like to finish in the cast iron with butter when I can.

I found an interesting sounding recipe and clicked the permalink button to share it, but the permalink 404s - https://airfry.pro/recipes/128

Wow as a dude living alone in my apartment, this will come in handy like seriously, thanks!

I am always wondering what health hazards are there with plastics inside, especially with the inevitable high temperatures?

That is a very good question. It is especially concerning when you realise that most air fryers use black plastic, and most black plastics are made old electronic scraps which are coated in flame retardants and other toxic chemicals like phthalates.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/01/health/flame-retardant-black-...

Great job, but please consider adding an option to show all temperatures in Celsius.

Click on the Fahrenheit symbol, top right.

The temperature scale switch only seems to apply to the listings page, and not the recipes themselves, which is annoying.

It does switch in the recipe popup to whatever is set on the main page. There doesn’t seem to be a way to flip it within the recipes.

Is all of the content AI generated?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com