Well yeah but it heats up a lot faster using a lot less energy
And it moves way more air than a normal oven, thus removing water vapor faster. This water vapor that partly steams the food, resulting in moisture saturated air that in turn prevents more moisture from escaping, is the main difference between a frying pan and an oven. A deep fryer replaces the water with oil, an air fryer just extracts the water quicker. Both prevent the food from cooking in water or steam, resulting in a crispy texture.
The past three houses I’ve lived in have had convection ovens; I thought convection mode was fairly common by now.
Every place I’ve ever rented has had the cheapest possible electric coil stove with no features, some of them didn’t even have a “clean” setting.
Never even heard of electric stoves with a clean function. Never seen a gas stove.
The clean function locks the door, cranks up the heat, and burns off all the crud in the oven. You can vacuum any ashes left after it cools down. Its awesome if you’re lazy like me. I have zero interest in bringing out the Easy Off and elbow length rubber gloves.
And 3/4 work (on a good day)
Oh, yeah. It’s been a long while since I’ve lived in that environment. You’re probably right that most cheap stand-alone stovetop/oven units don’t have a convection setting.
It is unless you are buying the cheapest model(s) possible.
I’ve seen them commonly in homes in Europe, but I’ve not seen them once in the US. But even convection ovens are not as effective as air fryers because they’re not as efficiently designed. They use the same principle, but the shape and fan power to volume ratio in air fryers is much better. Also, not all air fryers are the same, some are way more effective than others.
You mean like a… Convection oven!!!
It absolutely is a convection oven however the rate of airflow is faster therefore the reaction is more pronounced.
Exactly, and most Americans don’t even have a convection oven either, so in that case the air fryer is functionally different from their oven.
Most people don’t even know how to use their microwave properly. You really think they know how to use their convection oven properly? It’s not WHAT it does, it’s that an air fryer is usually simple and has shit like “turn dial here to cook a chicken”.
People like it because they don’t know what they’re doing and it does it for them.
Yes, but smaller!
I’m not here to convert you, but this is just as dismissive as OP. Yes it’s a convection oven. We also have a full size convection oven. It does not cook things as dramatically faster as an air fryer does. It’s not the same experience at all.
I say this as someone who literally said, “so it’s just a small convection oven” until we got one. We have used it literally every day since getting it ~2 years ago.
It’s not just any of these things:
- Toaster oven
- Small convection oven
- Small oven
There is so much air moving around in an air fryer that parchment paper without food holding it down gets immediately sucked against the circulating fan filter (which we learned the hard way) and lighter bits of food (like cooked bacon that you might toss in for a quick reheat) will swirl around inside the cook basket.
It may not be for everyone, but it absolutely does cook food faster than in a regular oven, sometimes by an astonishing amount. We have a short but significant list of things that we also think are noticeably better from an air fryer, and nothing I can think of that we’ve tried comes out worse.
What about frozen stuff?
Frozen stuff works great, everything from fries to eggrolls.
You will start to get an idea how long things take after you have it. Many things now have airfryer instructions, or there are lots of “how to make xxx in an airfryer” articles.
Generic airfryer instructions are usually pretty close for ours, but any given model may have its own cookbook with times for different sorts of things (ours does) and after awhile you’ll get a feel for how to nudge generic instructions to fit your model.
For a very small number of specific kinds of breaded things, I’ll spritz them with cooking spray when they go in to help them get more like they were fried in oil, but that’s really personal preference and I only do it on a couple of things.
Get one with a big enough basket. Things need to be cooked in a single layer. You can pack it pretty full, but single layer is important.
Thanks
This is the big thing. So many times we want to heat up some left-overs and that would turn soggy in a microwave, but heating up the oven to reheat a few square inches of food is a vast waste of energy.
These take up a lot of space, though. I think one of those double ovens, where one is only tall enough for one tray, would be ideal. Convection, of course, but I haven’t seen a built-in without a convection mode in years.
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I’ve considered one if those as well; convection heat does make a difference, though, and that’d be nice to have. It seems to me that convection is the thing that turns a toaster oven into an air fryer.
They definitely cook different! Right tool for the job, and ideally my next toaster oven will do both.
I find my air fryer is great for crispy anything. However in my use it’s been almost exclusively for veggies: fries, broccoli, zuchini, onion rings it’s impossible to beat. Really any dish that’s traditionally deep fried, its great.
Doing small batches of bacon, chicken wings, breads, small desserts, reheating last night’s pizza, those are prime candidates for my toaster oven. Air fried chicken wings and baked potatoes never give me the right texture.
Yeah! So the ideal tool would be both a toaster oven – a small oven – and have the ability, a setting, to circulate air in the same way an air fryer does, right?
And convects much more powerfully and efficiently since it’s shaped like a cylinder instead of a cube and the fan strength to volume ratio is way better.
It doesn’t take half an hour to pre heat, it doesn’t heat up the whole house, and I’m not sending my power bill through the roof every time I want to make a meal for one person lol
My oven heats up in like 3-5 mins
Lucky you! I’ve never in my life used an oven that took less than 15 minutes to pre heat at the bare minimum
Is it gas? Getting an electric oven to 450 usually takes 15 minutes.
I thought you guys had 240v circuits precisely for this kind of load? On a decent 30a 230v circuit (they generally don’t use anywhere near 30a though) here in Europe it takes considerably less than that. I’d say mine takes 5-8mins for 230c (which is around 450f) and it has a rated power of 3500w.
Most of our ovens aren’t hooked up to 240v
Most electric ovens are. 220-240v anyway.
AFAIK almost any appliance labelled/presumed to be 220V in the US is actually 240V unless it was made before the 50s, because we aren’t allowed to have nice things (like accuracy)
Yes. The USA switched our mains voltage from 110/220 to 120/240 about 50 years. There is a tolerance built in (10%) so that if a circuit is actually running at 100 or 220 then its within specs. A 120v circuit can run anywhere from 108 volts to 132 volts and be within spec. Its a pet peeve of mine when people say 110/220.
I’ve never seen an electric oven that wasn’t 240 volts.
My Beko oven takes about 25 minutes to preheat to 450. Yes, its 240 volts.
I guess it likely comes down to power rating, then. Also, with our old oven it used to take around 2x the time the current one does. That was just because the seal on the door was old and worn.
No its electric.
Could be a US low voltage issue? Since im European.
North American ovens run on 240v, they probably just need to replace the heating element
But my EU oven runs on 380V-16A three-phase, because we in the Netherlands and Germany are special snowflakes.
That’s awesome. You could probably run a proper kiln in place of your oven if you felt like it.
My Finnish oven runs on 380V too, although it’d hard-wired insted of a weird plug.
Mines 5 phase. My Dad got because he works at oven.
Ah Yeah maybe, Canadian but North America as a whole is the same standard of 240v for ovens. It could also be I’ve only used lower end ovens lol.
That’s probably true. Our electric kettles heat up much slower too for the same reason.
The only large appliances that aren’t running 220-240v in the US are the refrigerator and dishwasher .Ovens, washing machines, tumble dryers, furnaces, and water heaters are all on 240 volts.
In Europe, at least my oven is hooked up to 3 phase 400V. That’s more than the 240 max you get in the US.
Serious question, with that much power do you even pre-heat the oven? At that much power, I imagine you can just put the food in and turn it on.
450F takes my older electric oven less than five minutes, jeeeeez
My oven won’t go higher than 275.
OP is talking about Fahrenheit, but didn’t say so for whatever reason. Most ovens I’ve seen also max out around 275 Celcius.
That’s not even an oven, that’s like… a warm box
275° is enough to 3D print most plastics.
Me omw to eat my 3d printed chicken
Just tested my air frier and it’s takes about 2 minutes, but obviously, it’s way more energy efficient. Plus easier clean up. I can just throw a bunch of fries and chicken strips in there and it’s good to go. Whereas with an oven I’d probably need to buy a special rack or something so all the oils don’t stick to the bottom of the fries. Plus heating up all that empty space!
I thought that was the case with my gas oven, until I had a timer running one day and realized it was actually more like 10 minutes to get to 450.
It’s a small convection oven. Most ovens are not convection ovens, they’re fan ovens or gas ovens. The biggest downside to both of them is that what you’re mostly heating up is empty space.
I can practically fill my air fryer with enough food for one person. Clearly more efficient.
Also because of the small size it heats up basically instantly, none of this preheating the oven for 45 minutes before you can cook anything.
They also use air that moves a lot faster than a convection oven, which makes a huge difference.
And they’re also rounded instead of a square so the air moves more efficiently, which also makes a huge difference.
Most ovens are not convection ovens, they’re fan oven
As far as I understand the nomenclature, fan ovens are convection ovens.
following because I also dk the difference here
The difference is between normal ovens with top and bottom heating elements and a fan that moves the air around on one hand and a real convection oven that has a heating element in front of the fan on the other.
Your air fryer likely runs on 120v if you are in the US and your oven runs on 240v. This changes the efficiency equation.
240v lets you pump more amps through smaller gauge wire, but since it’s an air fryer only needs to maintain a certain temperature, 120v is fine, and will not use any additional power over 240v. The amount of total watt hours used is what determines efficiency.
Where 240v is nice is with electric water kettles, where the higher voltage increases your wattage ceiling, letting you dump the energy into the water faster, and thus boiling it faster. A 120v electric kettle would use the same amount of total watt hours to boil the water, but because it’s heating it with a lower wattage output, it just takes longer.
Technology Connections did a good video on the subject.
It’s a concentrated convection oven. It’s not magic, but I definitely like mine. Great for side dishes like roasted veggies. Also uses wayyyyy less power and time than a full oven when you’re only baking something small enough to fit in an air fryer
I bought mine because it was cheap and didn’t really think i use it all too much. I hardly ever used my oven ever since. It’s nothing special per se, but it uses less energy and everything goes way faster, because you don’t have to heat up a really big box for a piece of bread.
I thought they were dumb for the longest time, but I only have a conventional oven. Some stuff you want a convection oven for. It’s definitely a WAY cheaper alternative than buying a new oven that has both features, that’s for sure. Definitely need to adjust to the difference for temperature and time though, I’ve made that mistake before
Also compared to a full size convection oven, the airflow is much faster and more concentrated in an air fryer, giving not just faster cooking times but a crispier skin effect
It’s a nice little convection oven. Especially great for one or two people.
I can’t fit one person in, let alone two. What’s your secret?
you need the one with shelves rather than the “fryer basket”
Good cutting technique.
I was expecting the tubby custard machine
Just use your shrink ray first, obviously. That’s what I do.
That sounds rather inhumane.
Well excuuuuuse me! Look at captain morals over here! Pff… Wimp!
Even worse - it is a counter appliance and therefore the path of degeneracy.
I got a larger air fryer that has now replaced my small convection oven, microwave, and toaster. If anything, it’s reduced my counter appliances.
That’s what we have. We found it when our previous microwave finally shit the bed and we got really lucky with the timing and everything; it was on sale and we had the money. It’s awesome! Especially in a very small apartment with barely any counter or cabinet space.
I’m going to have to try replacing my microwave with my air fryer. We mostly use the microwave for reheating food, so I’m worried the fryer will dry things out too much. Any tips?
The other thing we use it for is popcorn, but we eat that almost exclusively in another room, so I could totally just move the microwave there (or get a dedicated air popper).
Mine folds up and is also my toaster oven
Link? My wife wants a bigger one, and I don’t want to use that much space on such a thing. Costco has this one, but it doesn’t fold up.
Are you maybe talking about the Ninja Foodi?
Yeah it’s the foodi. My wife likes the air frying, I love the toaster oven aspect.
Oven with a fan. Checkmate fanboys.
One might call it a convection oven.
If one doesn’t realize you can trick Americans into buying anything that implies frying.
Everything is better fried tho.
Keep in mind we were settled by Scot’s and Germans. We like our frying
Fan-forced oven gang
When you’re paying to heat 5000% more air than you need to, it doesn’t matter what the device that saves you money is called.
You’re also trying to move 5000% more air than you need to in a square instead of a cylinder, so you’re not going to get nearly as much crisp either.
It is a bit more complicated than that. The WAY it moves the air is different than in a convection oven, so it “fries” a bit better.
This guy does a great breakdown of how it isn’t “just a convection oven”
Just a heads up, the ?si=… part of the youtube url is a tracker linked to you and your youtube history. Youtube will recommend people who click your link other things you watch. The ? and everything afterward can be safely removed and the link will still work.
Same is true for Amazon and other POS websites. Always try slimming your links before sharing with others.
Thanks!
Thanks for sharing this, interesting recipe too, I will try it. The cross section of the air fryer was cool.
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He literally cut one in half and showed how the air flowed and explained why it was different and more akin to deep frying. Maybe watch a video next time before critiquing it.
Tldr, no. To everything you just said.
That was like 10 frames and he didn’t explain shit.
Your a liar and a troll. Fuck off and stop harassing me.
This made my day ty
Toaster oven with a fan.
Oversized fan. A lot of toaster ovens already were able to do convection cooking, just need to move more air and provide a basket to call it an air fryer.
As a side note, I highly recommend a good toaster oven to everyone. It heats up so much faster than the normal oven, and when reheating things, it doesn’t ruin the texture like a microwave. And I don’t have to store separate toaster and air fryer.
Toaster ovens are also good for annealing small amounts of metal!
I love this so much. The idea of needing to anneal small amounts of metals on a regular enough basis that it’s worth getting a toaster oven to pull double duty is so foreign to me. However knowing that there are people out there for whom that can be a genuine factor when deciding whether or not to buy a toaster oven, fills me with glee.
I make knives so it’s the best thing for it. Small footprint, ease of use, and not a huge energy drain.
Though, I don’t cook food in the one I use for knives.
You should make burgers in that thing and sell them as healthy because of the “extra iron content” "
With metal filing sprinkles!
Where else would you get the iron from? =P
That’s hella cool! What kind of knives do you make?
Mostly “bushcraft” knives. So they are fixed blade and full tang. Nothing special.
I honestly end up modifying knives I’ve gotten a hold of more than anything. Have one of those Ferrari chef knives I’ve modified for my own personal use.
That’s really cool! Thank you for sharing. :)
And a better shape. Putting a fan in a box is like trying to stir a pot of water in a square pot. The convention toaster oven form factor is dumb.
Air fryers are basically just small convection ovens. If you have an oven then an air fryer does nothing you can’t already do. That said, it does cook some things slightly faster due to the confined space. I’ve found mine will cook a chicken in just over an hour saving maybe 20 or 30 minutes on a regular oven. I guess it also saves energy / money but whether it ever pays for itself is another question.
Also heats up considerably faster than a normal oven. It’s so good for reheating most stuff.
Generally it will cook a lot of things better than consumer ovens because consumer ovens are fucking garbage.
But yeah, it’s just a small convection oven that heats faster and more evenly. I love mine. I mostly only use the oven for things that require a solid tray or don’t do well with the fan in close proximity (mostly certain frozen foods). And baking.
I have a convection hob that plugs in and it’s way better than the electric elements built into the stove for most stuff.
I’m not going to cook a whole turkey any time soon. Bigger ovens like this are a product of post war consumerism.
https://www.tasteofhome.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/354_Appliances_53.jpg?fit=335,335
I’ve had multiple airfryers, not against them per se. There are some things they cook better IMO. Cocktail sausages come out well. Whole chickens too. Anything you can fit the relatively small dimensions and either lays flat on the bottom or can withstand agitation/stirring AND has good heat dispersion / circulation. Small portions work better. Generally they’re easy to clean although steel baskets and plastic fixtures on tend to be very flimsy and they don’t last more than a year or two of regular use. I even had an airfryer which had this stirring mechanism in it which supposedly negated the need to turn stuff over but often it just caused some foods to disintegrate into starchy crumbs.
As for consumer ovens, can’t say I’ve had any major issues ever with them, be they electric or gas. They’re less efficient and slower to warm which is their downside. Once they’re up and cooking I think they work fine and are obviously more versatile.
Pick the best tool for the job at hand basically. I think also, that something like an instant pot (or similar) is a better and more versatile device to buy before an airfryer.
Air fryer is just pure convenience. I could cook the chicken in the oven and probably have it come out okay. But, I could cook it in the air fryer, have nice and crunchy skin and save a pan.
I find cleaning the air fryer to be a pain. It’s got the rack at the bottom that I have to scrum, and then the catch pan. If I cook a chicken in my cast iron pan in the oven, I have one flat surface to clean, as opposed to 1 flat surface and one complicated surface. What am I missing?
Laziness.
I clean it infrequently. Pretty much when grease from previous foods starts impacting the flavor in a negative way.
I just heat it up and pour out the grease. Then scrub it, cleans up easily when everything is hot.
I should add, small air fryers suck. You need a good sized one for it to be worth using.
Put tinfoil at the the bottom. Throw tinfoil away if dirty.
The bin itself isn’t much of a problem. It’s the rack that holds the food up so the air can circulate underneath that’s the real bitch to clean.
Yeah the oven you just need to turn on clean cycle, leave the house for a few hours and then shop vac any ashes once it cools down.
My oven doesn’t even get dirty when I cook a chicken. I haven’t needed to clean mine in the 5 years I’ve lived in my house and we cook multiple times every week.
But every time we use our air fryer, I need to clean it because it’s a mess.
Yes but I have an air fryer setting on my oven. It was much more expensive and does nothing exciting!
There are two kinds of reactions to trying out an air fryer:
“Wow, this is so much better than a normal oven” and
“Wow, this is so much worse than a normal fryer”
I am very much of the latter opinion
Mine is
“Wow, this can prepare so many different things in an easy and lazy way, i dont care if its not as tasty, beats not having food because i was to tired”
Deep fat fryers are fairly easy to use though. Also quite quick. They don’t need cleaning with every use (maybe every 5 or 6 uses). What they aren’t good for is having a clean kitchen. Creates steam, oil splatter, and they smell when in use. Can be a complete bitch to clean too, especially depending on the design. Even the easy to clean ones eat soap as the waste and dirt is oil saturated.
If your gonna list the pros of a deep fryer, list the main con- smells like grease all the time
There would probably also be some health complications if you deep fry half as much food as I air fry/toaster oven.
My god, I’d be huger than I am now
I said they smell when in use. If you’re not using it it has a lid on, so you don’t really smell it. Unless you just don’t put the lid on…
I meant they smell when not in use, lid or not 🤷♂️
You either have a very sensitive nose or your doing something wrong.
Definitely #1, but I also wouldn’t completely rule out #2 🤔
Agreed on all of these points.
The major difference in effort is to carry the smelly deepfryer to the garage because no way would we keep that on the counter top and cramped storage tiny kitchen.
While the air fryer has can easily live on the counter’s top especially with all the extra stuff it can do. (The Easiest soft Boiled eggs ftw) we keep it right next to the equally life saving expansive rice coocker. Workspace is a plank on the stove, who needs pans and pots? (Exaggeration)
Ok I love my air fryer but I do not understand the love for rice cookers. It’s just so easy to cook rice already. The hard and annoying part is washing the rice
The difference is the cooker consistently makes better rice then anyone i know, we imported it from Asia and holy fuck have they perfected the science of rice cooking.
But does it pilaf? I like to toast my rice in a seasoned oil a little bit before cooking it. Ideally with spices similar to what are in the curry or beans going with it
If you actually cared about space you wouldn’t have an air fryer and a rice cooker. You would use a convection oven and a pan respectively. Also how is it any easier to do boiled eggs? Surely the hardest part is peeling it. Rice cookers I can see being useful because they avoid cleaning pans with rice stuck to the bottom all the time.
Each their own executive dysfunction i guess,
I do care a lot about space but i cant hold a job and cook a semi healthy meal everyday. So i barely used the space and just ate junk food and takeaway. Sacrificing the space for these devices means a decent meal can be optained with no more then 5 min of prep and wasting for a “ding”, no concentration required.
On some days just dealing with finding the right pan or pot and remembering that oh shit i have sm on the fire is believe it or not a challenge for me personally.
For boilder eggs i just trow em in the air fryer for 6min and there consistently perfect.
Once their on my plate most of my personal executive dysfunction disappears, i never struggled opening eggs up.
I am a bit lost on what you can do with one that an oven can’t. I get they are slightly faster and more energy efficient, but functionally I thought they were basically the same. What am I missing?
Technical abilities aren’t all that different towards an oven but convenience is at least compared to my conventional oven
Airfryers are alot quicker. modern models dont even require preheating so there is much less need to plan ahead.
The results is also much crispier (from trying to simulate a fryer) so some stuff intended for oven actually tastes better from an airfryer, i find more and more boxes of fried stuff like chicken nuggets that are intended for air fryers that ovens used to struggle with. (At least subjective tastewise) there is one exception which is pizza, i am rather peculiar in how i like my pizza. Reheating a slice does work but conventional oven absolutely wins the pizza game.
Its somewhat easier to clean and maintain, most parts fit in the dishwasher, may vary by model.
bonus is energy efficiency but admittedly the real major reason i and my household love it is the super low bar of a quick easy meal where before we defaulted much more to junk. It made a measurable positive difference to our diet without to much conscious effort.
Yes, it’s good to cook rice in a, [checks notes], pan.
Are you saying you have never cooked rice in a pan?
I’ve fried already-cooked rice in a pan, but when I cook rice it’s in a pot. Have you cooked rice in a pan?
When my mom had a deep fryer, she made us put the used oil back in a bottle and clean the fryer after every use. She just went back to using a pot after few times because it was less hassle.
Eh, to me the thing is trying to do is cook food in a way that’s similar to deep frying, but with a tiny fraction of the oil. I think they do that reasonably well. It’s not for everything, but they really are good for a number of things - way better for reheating leftover fried food than either a microwave or regular oven. I like the way vegetables come out, too.
The only time I used an air fryer was when my appliances got destroyed during height of covid. I ordered new ones right away and had to change my order after 5 months because none of them had arrived or had a possible date. I borrowed an air fryer to get me by. I ate a lot of pizza rolls.
Mine also comes as an air grill and making hamburgers from frozen patties takes roughly 15 minutes, bonus it doesn’t make a mess on my stovetop and most of the fat drips at the bottom.
Yeah it is a small oven, but you use it like a microwave.
Throw it in, put on a timer, and in a couple of minutes your thing will be ready.
And it’ll taste so much better than when you put it in a microwave. Microwave makes things soggy. ovens make things crispy.
Right? Why is a small, fast oven a disappointment?
The drawer-style air fryers are kinda dumb but the ones with the rotating basket on the inside really do cook french fries way better than you could in a regular oven spread out on a sheet pan and without having to heat up a bunch of oil in a pan to get similar texture.
Came here to say this. It feels like they’re so attached to the “fryer” narrative that they designed it so they can say “look, it even has a fryer basket” but that basket is dumb. When I had one it had shelves which meant I could make more stuff at a time and what I made came out better because it wasn’t all piled on top of itself. Also the rotisserie with the skewer made whole chickens pretty quickly and the rotating basket made the bangin’est oven fries.
If you happen to remember what brand name it had or what it was called, I’d love to know. Sounds amazing.
It was a gift and has long since died. best I can do for you is that it says “power air fryer oven” on the front
I had a chefman air fryer. The 10qt one and it has 5 positions for the shelves, came with two racks. It is really great for cooking a few things at the same time that you want basted in fat.
I cook sausages on the top rack then fries underneath, the fat drips on the fries and makes them tastier.
I was pretty lazy with it and some fat got into the electronics and it started smoking. I’m now going to buy the 12 qt version.
French fries should be fried not baked.
They are fried. The store-bought kind are essentially just being reheated from frozen whether it’s in an oven or in an air fryer.
