Will you still love your air fryer tomorrow?

What will you actually do with that new air fryer if you give in and buy one? Obviously, you’re going to unpack your new air fryer, put it on a counter in the kitchen, and stare at it for a week or two while you try to puzzle out what the heck to do with it. 

Right? Like you do when you buy a new car — park it in the sunshine, admire it for a few weeks, and then decide, ah well, maybe I’d better start using this thing. 

Let me try to help the sceptics understand why to resist the temptation to have an air fryer in your kitchen is as silly as those who shunned the newfangled gadget patented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. They’ll never catch on! Right…

In January 2023, when I first introduced our weekly AirFryday feature, I wondered the same thing myself: will this air fryer be like my pasta machine, largely ignored, and ultimately end up somewhere in a cupboard? Like my old sandwich maker?

Ah! Well, there’s just one thing an air fryer does: it turns out perfect toasted sandwiches in just a few minutes.

But that was one thing I didn’t know back then. One of many things. I also asked myself: Will I be able to keep this up, a recipe a week, and for how long? Months? A year? More?

Well. Let’s just say they’ve caught on, and of all the varied food stories I write and publish here, the air fryer pieces are the most widely and keenly read.

Because they are here to stay, just as the car in your driveway is. And your air fryer will outlast both your toaster and your microwave, both of which may be headed for obsolescence at some point, or will at least see their popularity decline.

Oh and another thing: Those horror stories about air fryers exploding and causing your house to burn down… they’re clickbait nonsense. Your air fryer is no less dangerous than a pot of milk on the stove. Maybe something could possibly go wrong, but most of us manage to get through life without having the fire brigade come around because the milk boiled over, causing you to reach for it frantically, knocking your elbow on the pan of oil bubbling alongside, which overturned onto the naked gas flame, with the flames licking the cupboards above, ending up with you sobbing in the street for all that is lost.

Your air fryer is considerably less likely to do any of that.

Once you’ve become accustomed to all that an air fryer can do for you, once your current microwave and toaster reach the end of their lives and need replacement, you may wonder whether you really need to replace them. But time will tell. At the very least, I think their numbers will decrease over time.

To elaborate a little on the above thoughts: we hardly ever use our microwave, although the toaster does get put to fair usage. So the “mike” will be first out the door.

I do make toast in an air fryer. Ordinary slices, and the other day I made toasted cheese sarmies in an air fryer. Earlier this week I was making us bread rolls, using buns I had bought. I popped the rolls into an air fryer at 200°C for 2 minutes to “wake them up” — once they’re hot, it’s as if they’re freshly baked. They get a bit crusty, which is lovely, and the insides turn all soft and yummy.

We’re approaching midway through 2025 (the rest of May, and June, will whizz by in a blurry flash, I guarantee it), and I use my air fryers every day for one thing or another. Potatoes in all guises (except boiled or mashed, obviously), vegetables of all kinds, roasted meat (and roasted veg for that matter), quiches, cakes, bread (loaves and rolls).

Does an air fryer have limitations? Well, I could ask: Does your toaster have limitations? Well, you can’t boil an egg in a toaster. Or make a béchamel sauce in it. Or turn out a perfect Bolognese sauce. 

But do we try to use any kitchen device for anything it has not been designed for? It’s an “air fryer” and is fit for its intended purpose, and its uses are wide and varied. Much more so than that toaster, which may well now be on the list of kitchen gadgets heading for obsolescence.

Not everyone has an air fryer — yet — but the idea that they might be a passing fad is ridiculous. Quite frankly, those who are so adamantly opposed to air fryers are approaching Luddite status. Like those people three decades ago — mid-Nineties — who went on and on about how these stupid cellular telephones wouldn’t take off, and “I wouldn’t be seen dead with one of those” — well, look at us all now, unable to go anywhere without our mobile devices right next to us.

Let’s not go so far as having our air fryers follow us around town on a leash, but at least in the kitchen, where these devices belong, they’re pretty damn useful. I was a sceptic at first — highly sceptical, in fact — but it only took me a few weeks of using one to realise that this was the best new gadget to enter the kitchen since the microwave. And it is far, far more useful than those.

Then, in January 2023, I introduced our AirFrydays. Wondering if I’d be able to come up with new air fryer recipes week after week. Whether my air fryer pen would run dry, as it were. 

One thing I need more time to think about: I’m not convinced about bakes in an air fryer. But I’ll keep experimenting and let you know of any progress that changes my mind about air fryer bakes, such as potatoes Dauphinoise or macaroni cheese. Mind you, I have baked puddings in an air fryer and achieved a fair result.

Have they caught on in my home? One hundred percent. Two-and-(nearly)-a-half years in, I’ve produced somewhere north of 130 recipes, and I’ve barely scraped the bottom of the air fryer basket to achieve that (figuratively speaking — don’t scrape that!).

Oh, another thing I’m sometimes asked: How to clean it? Some people even say they find them very difficult to clean.

Huh? Maybe they bought some weird model of air fryer that has been over-designed, but my two (by two different brands) are ridiculously easy to clean.

They’re both the kind of air fryers that have drawers you pull in and out again, rather than the kind that have a pull-down door with a window in it. I imagine they might be less easy to clean, although even with those I don’t see why it should require too much effort. Don’t you just take out the rack/s, wash them in the sink, dry them and put them back in?

My Instant Vortex Plus 5.7-litre air fryer only requires that I pull out the basket, which has a snugly fitting rack in it, and wash them in soapy water, rinse, and dry. Simple as that, like washing a pot you’ve used on the stove. My Kenwood two-drawer oven (and they are little ovens, not “air fryers”, which is a misnomer) has two drawers which I clean in exactly the same way.

Often, I have all three drawers cooking different things at the same time — a chicken roasting in the Vortex, potatoes roasting in one drawer of the Kenwood for 40 minutes or so at 200°C, carrots cooking and glazing in the other drawer at 180°C for 20 minutes. I can even set their timers to sync so that one starts cooking first, with the second kicking in, say, 20 minutes later, and both drawers ending their cooking cycles in the same second.

Which is one reason I suggest that people buy two air fryers — your entire meal of three different elements can be cooked simultaneously. You can even take one on holiday with you, although, again, I predict that guest house owners will be putting air fryers into their self-catering accommodation as a matter of course from now on. Maybe instead of that microwave. Some such accommodation often has one of those mini ovens on a table — that’s where the air fryer will go in due course.

Which, by the way, is one way you could find out what it’s like to use one if you haven’t yet emerged from your Luddite bubble: book a self-catering unit with an air fryer next time you plan a mini-break. Then go home and buy one. DM