I’ll be honest and say this is a purchase I didn’t plan to make, I have been listening to the hype and holding off from buying an air fryer, but I recently changed my mind and we quickly became the next air frying family.
The three reasons I didn’t want to buy an air fryer where pretty strong, or so I thought:
- The external size – Seriously it is huge and where am I supposed to put it?
- The internal size – Seriously it is small, as a family of 5 I figured those 1L variants would provide us with one chip each (yes it will be fast and crispy, but just the one 😆)
- The fried factor – I absolutely love fried foods and I thought this might encourage me to eat more, because let’s be honest oven baked spring rolls aren’t worth eating! (and so I don’t).
So, what made me purchase this over-sized, under spaced, expensive chip maker?
Two words – Time Saver.
I am very fortunate to have a lovely oven. The big type that can handle a lot of food (technically well beyond my cooking level), and whilst it does come in handy with guests, it does take a lot of time to heat up, especially when it is a quick bite to eat or a re-heat of a single slice of pizza. So the quick heat and cook times of the air fryer caught my attention.
I will also confess, that fluffy yet crispy chips in 15 minutes, instead of my 45+ minute dried out oven baked ones, appealed to the fried food monster within. So, to avoid soggy microwaved pizza and to be able to cook crispy chips in 15 minutes, I bought an air fryer. However, I made a deal with myself that If I was going to give up kitchen space for said machine, I needed to do more with it than fry chips and heat pizza!
Let me be clear, I am not an air fryer expert, and I don’t have any affiliation with them. In fact, don’t even ask me what brand I purchased as I couldn’t even tell you, I had no idea what I was doing. All I can say is that because I was so paranoid of only getting one chip, I purchased a huge 8 litre model and it can do a packet of frozen chips in about 15 minutes for our family (#winning). It is huge, it is noisy (that was a new surprise), but I can definitely see why busy families have fallen in love with them.
As for what to cook beyond chips, it is early days for us, but here a few items from some fantastic sites that I have used, no cake or whole chicken yet, but give me time (no pun intended).