One month. No oven. Only air fryer use, all the time. Here’s what I learned and why it’s changed the way I cook
I’ve tested a lot of air fryers. At any given time, I have two or three air fryers lined up on my kitchen counter, giving the room the warm, welcoming vibe of an appliances showroom.
As I spent more time using them for work, I broke the habit of automatically switching on my oven when it came time to cook – for simple tasks, at least.
I started to wonder if I really needed to use my oven at all. So I decided to swap all my oven cooking to an air fryer for a month to find out. After all, an air fryer doesn’t actually fry food. It’s a mini convection oven that can cook almost anything an ordinary oven can.
The rules of the experiment were that I had to cook everything in the air fryer that I’d usually cook in the oven, and I couldn’t start eating beige frozen food for every meal.
Here’s what I learned in that month.Reheating means rethinking
My first act of food violence was unthinkingly reheating a couple of pizza slices using the recommended reheating temperature of 170°C/340°F for a little too long, which swiftly and efficiently transformed them into olive-speckled pieces of cardboard.
If you have a powerful air fryer and you’re cooking almost anything except frozen, breaded chicken or chips, the best bit of cooking advice is to turn down the heat by 10°C/50°F.
There’s a learning curve to switching to air fryer cooking, and while you’re figuring out perfect cooking temperatures, you can always add a couple of minutes of extra time. You can’t turn cardboard back into pizza.Microwave + air fryer is still faster than an oven
I made individual shepherd’s pies in stoneware dishes, because I’m fancy like that, and heated them up the next day. Ordinarily, I’d put them in the oven for at least 45 minutes (and they’d still probably be cold in the middle) but as the oven was banned, I used the air fryer instead.
They came out perfectly – and were done quickly – with a light, crispy crust on the potato. But it was still a bit of a nuisance to keep testing the centre of the pie to see if it was cooked.
