Can you save time with an air fryer?

Whether you’re researching before you purchase, or you already have an air fryer, you’re probably interested in not just the health benefits of cooking with less oil, but also in saving time.

How Air Fryers Work

As the name suggests, air fryers use air to brown foods. While the name also suggests frying, that’s not really the case. Air fryers circulate hot air around your food to achieve a similar result to frying, using a similar method to a convection oven.

You can read more about how they work , but Kenji López-Alt summarized it for us:

One thing to remember is that you’re restricted to “frying” dry foods - Such as chips or crumbed/breaded protein, but temupra or other batters will drip away from the food before they set during cooking.

So, How Does an Air Fryer Save Time?

• Their smaller size allows them to heat up much quicker than a typical oven
• Being smaller than an oven means they can more efficiently cook smaller portions
• An air fryer’s fan is usually larger and spins faster than an oven’s fan.

Some Quick and Easy Recipes

Quick and easy recipes go hand-in-hand with the concept of using this new appliance which is, at least partly, designed to save you time. Here are some things to try:

• Everyone’s first thought? Fries , without the oil
• If it is a mini oven, banana bread should be no problem
• Easy to clean up wings

Nutshell - An Alternative Time Saver

So air fryers work best with certain foods, they don’t work at all with others. They might save time, or you may have to cook in batches, blowing out the cooking time. For meals an air fryer can’t help you with, try Nutshell, our Chrome Extension. Nushell can save several minutes of reading and scrolling each recipe you browse to by jumping straight to the ingredients! Download it free , from the Chrome Web Store.