Win on AirFryday! And 5 air fryer tips for would-be MasterChefs

I can’t wait to see how MasterChef South Africa contestants handle their air fryer challenge on S3 tomorrow night (Saturday, 31 August). They’ve been set a task of cooking “a modern dish in an air fryer which would befit a high-end bistro menu, using potatoes as the hero ingredient”.

I’m pretty sure I’d cook hasselback potatoes, but give them a twist. By now, of course, their choices will have long been done and dusted, or seasoned and roasted, having been filmed some weeks ago. As it turns out, some of the contestants had never cooked in an air fryer… that should be fun.

But that’s the air fryer story: most of us had no idea how to handle them when we first bought them, though 18 months or so down the road I’ve learnt a lot and have been sharing everything I’ve learnt with you.

What would your choice of a potato dish be if you had to come up with something in a MasterChef challenge? I ask for a good reason: if you come up with your own potato recipe for an air fryer, based on the above challenge, and send it to me, I will select one of them. Because somebody is going to win an air fryer.

Ah! Now that I have your full attention, a reminder, as I wrote only recently, that many of us will own a second air fryer one day. Read why in this piece.

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• Ignore all the advice about only spraying potatoes with cooking oil spray. Rather pour oil into a bowl, season it (salt, pepper, herbs, spices, whatever) and roll the potatoes in that before roasting them.


• Roast them till they’re right. Not for a given length of time. They’re done when you know they’re done: crispy outside, soft and fluffy inside.


• Choose a good high temperature to start with, then turn it down to, say, 160°C, and then turn it up again for the last stretch. You need to put some mental work in: 180°C? 200°C? Figure it out. It’s a challenge, remember. Not that it needs to be roast potatoes – be more adventurous than that.


• Having chosen your temperatures, calculate your cooking times according to what you already know about cooking potatoes. And no, Jason, you can’t boil potatoes in an air fryer. (But you could boil potatoes, mash them and use it as a topping to be finished in the air fryer? Melted cheese on top?)


• If making hasselbacks, be deft with that small, sharp knife. The gaps between the slats should be thin, and cut no more than halfway through.

• The name of the dish;


• One paragraph describing your dish;


• A list of the ingredients;


• The temperatures and times you cooked it for; and


• Your answer to this question: Which retailer sponsors all the food used by contestants on MasterChef South Africa?