Air fryers are the new hotness in the kitchen, but are they actually any different than a convection oven? [Technology Connections] walks us through the design of these countertop appliances to find out.
If you like your fries and chicken crispy instead of soggy, you traditionally had to eat out or spend the better part of an hour waiting on your food to cook to a crisp in the oven. Convection ovens significantly speed up this process by moving the air about and keeping the food from sucking most of the heat out of the stagnant layer just next to it.
It turns out that most air fryers are just a coil stove element and a fan placed above a basket which is just a fancy re-arrangement of the parts of a toaster or convection oven. The magic sauce here is the small size and the fact you don’t have to futz with pulling a hot wire basket out of your toaster or larger convection oven. The small size does give you a pretty big advantage in preheating and precise application of heat to the food for smaller batch sizes, but if you already have a convection oven, the advantages might not outweigh the additional space and cost of yet another kitchen gadget. We appreciate the sacrifice of eating “a lot of french fries” to test the differences between brands and conventional convection ovens for our edification.
If you’re looking for a way to make cookies faster instead of fries, how about this hack using a microwave and a heat gun? Or maybe it’s better to redesign the food instead of the appliance like this ramen in an edible package or these origami noodles.
“New” hotness? So, nothing new has appeared in the kitchens the last 5 or so years?
Nothing has happened in the last like fifty years except internet and phone stuff
You haven’t seen the experiment I’ve got going in the veg drawer.
I won’t argue about the terminology of air fryers, convection ovens or whatever. But why do people who argue that “air fryers are just convection ovens” never include anything about the rate of heat transfer? Air fryers often have much more powerful fans which can blast your food with hotter air, cooking/burning it much faster. In fact, its possible to even burn high moisture content food on the outside, while still not letting it fully cook inside.
I think air fryers have a different enough operation to warrant a specific name, and no longer be associated with “oven” term.
On one particularly sad night, I heated my dinner nuggets with a plumbing hot air gun, it does the job. Is it also a convection oven? (or a hair dryer?)
Words are often used to distinguish degrees of difference rather than clearcut overall function. Easy examples include supercar vs. car, or the cliche of cultures from arctic climes having tons of words for snow and white, but often are missing colors that seem natural to those of us from other cultures.
I find the argument against the inclusion of “air fryer” in our popular lexicon pedantic enough to ignore (except in this comment, lol).
There are practical differences, I’ll give you that.
The issue with the term “air fryer” (at least to me) is that frying requires oil, which makes the name fairly idiotic. Countertop convection oven at least makes sense
While frying does require oil,
getting a similar crispy golden exterior with minimal moisture loss is fairly accomplished fairly well by “air fryers”. Given the general publics lack of experience and familiarity with convection ovens, Id hardly consider the marketing decision to coin the term “air frying” idiotic. Its an effective description of the results.
Grr edit feature would be nice. Minus the extraneous “fairly” when reading please.
Air frying instead of oil frying?
That’s called baking.
Bake: in hot dry air
Steam: in hot moist air
fry: on a film of hot fat
shallow fry: half submerged in a layer of hot fat
deep fry: fully submerged in hot fat
boil/cook: in boiling water
etc.
“air-fry”: marketing term for baking in a convection oven with a fast fan, not true frying
Steaming is a bit more than just moist air. But as for baking, you can add some ice cubes or a tray of water to the oven to make it more moist, or if the thing you’re baking is moist enough, you’ll never have dry air. So baking can be moist or not, but once you add forced air, it changes everything from the default. You have to significantly adjust time and temperature even for mild airflow, even though the result is still like regular baking at slow air speeds.
So why does a fast fan qualify it? It’s because frying isn’t just about the fat, it’s about the heat transfer too. Hot water can do sous vide at less than boiling, or it can do not much more than boiling even with salt and pressure. While it’s true that water makes things soggy and fats make things oily, they both allow fast heat transfer compared to the temperature they’re used at – instead of something like flame grilling where you have a much higher temperature that almost all of the food never gets close to. A slow fan isn’t enough to really get into that range; it has to be fast enough.
They work suspiciously similarly to a convection oven.
Like how a heat gun works suspiciously like a hair dryer? Sure.
Do you call a heat gun a microwave?
I call mine “death ray”.
I made one of those once actually
Yeah, when I was a kid I had a job in catering and I got to use the very nice and expensive commercial kitchen ovens. It was just a very powerful electric coil with a nice big fan. That’s it. 19th century technology
I’ve worked extensively in institutional cooking in some kitchens that sent out between 2500-3000 meals per 1.5 hour seating, 3 seatings per day, 7 days per week. In the largest kitchen that did some prep for the smaller kitchens on campus, we had six combi ovens and six dedicated convection ovens (along with a handful of older conventional ovens that hadn’t been replaced yet, a blast chiller twice the size of a consumer refrigerator, a dozen 40gal steam jacketed kettles, some 15-ish gallon ones and a smattering of 5 gallon kettles, a bank of 20 fryers, a rotary oven the size of the average home bathroom and I’d guess 60-70 linear feet of flat top and grill surface – I won’t even get into the neat stuff that the bakery or the veg prep department had) and none of the ovens in their convection capacity (or “fry” function, which the combis had) could “air fry” like my little countertop unit at home does, even if we just had the entire oven loaded with just one grate that wasn’t crowded in the slightest. Granted, my countertop unit can’t touch what a 35lb deep fat fryer can do because, as we all hopefully know, air fryers are not deep fat fryers.
The long and the short of it is that a decent consumer level air fryer, while not really a fryer, does a better job of simulating a deep fat fry than any traditional convection oven that I have used in my career cooking professionally, whether that be in a large institutional setting, fine dining establishments, or even just people’s kitchens. Air fryers are quite small, so they heat up very quickly, and there is vastly more air movement which helps the outside of the food cook faster than the inside. They really are two different beasts even though they work on the same principle. On top of that, even with all my foodie friends, not many of us have a full sized convection oven at home. An air fryer is a great way to add a new tool to our arsenal without installing an entirely new oven. Bonus points for being able to air-fry without heating the house up in the summer – they are portable after all and can easily be set on the back porch to cook.
every day for dinner i use an air fryer to blast my corn syrup solids with microplastics, really helps mask the taste of the roundup
Dang I wonder why I and everyone I know has metabolic syndrome, so weird
Related, Big Clive tore-down an air fryer a few months back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5XCj99QICo
TIL that Americans call a fan assisted oven a convection oven.
I’d have thought a convection oven was one where heat was spread by convection currents caused by hot air rising. Another bit of US cooking terminology to confuse me :-)
From a heat transfer point of view, there are two types of convection :
– Natural convection, which is corresponds is due to buoyancy forces (for example, hot air rising)
– Forced convection, when you blow hot (or cold) air/a fluid over something.
See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convection_(heat_transfer)
Finally, note that “convection oven” is also used in some other languages too (French for example : “four à convection”) to signify that the oven has a fan.
They are just getting back at the UK for setting oven temperatures by “gas mark”
Making a list of all the weird language quirks that the English invented SOLELY to separate themselves from the Scotch, Irish, and filthy colonials could be a lifelong study for a team of dedicated historians and linguists
No. Those are conventional ovens.
-a conventional oven uses heat from top and bottom. It uses both radiated heat and natural convection to get heat to the food.
-a convection oven uses a fan and the heat often comes from the back, but can also come from the top. Due to forced convection the radiated heat reaching the food is less and the convection heat is more.
This video is from last November…
Slow news day.
Thanks for pointing that out, I almost went on and watched the video.
I wonder if a gas denser than air would produce a better result.
Or maybe higher pressure?
Or maybe a lighter one, for better heat transfer per kg, like helium, or hydrogen.
But all ideal-ish gasses are pretty much the same for heat transfer. The non-ideal gas “water” is exceptionally good though, due to the phase transition.
doesn’t have to be water, vapor phase soldering is done with a liquid that boils at soldering temperature, very efficient at achieving a consistent temperature because on cold parts it condenses heating them
Perfluoropolyethers are probably safer than cooking in rosin (potatoes) or even deep-frying in cooking oil. But I’m still not going to have any in my kitchen :-)
You’re going to run into unintended side effects because oxidation is a part of cooking, and also you’ll get other reactions with whatever other denser-than-air gas you use (I don’t know of anything significantly denser offhand which is noble)
Exotic new flavors and poisons may result
Nvm xenon and radon are pretty dense. Let’s make a radon air fryer, sounds awesome
I just bought one, even though I own a conventional stove with a fan oven.
It’s great!
I bought one of those cheap WallyWorld versions that Alec talked about and liked it well enough that I bought another one. Chicken nuggets and fries ready at the same time! I just can’t run them both on the same circuit at the same time in my old house.
I would not buy one, but I did win one at a raffle a few years back and it is kinda nice for stuff you want crispy or if you just don’t want to heat up the whole house with the oven.
we used to have this super simple bucket full of oil that you plug in and presto. Called a FryDaddy I think. Deep fryer. no thermostat, nothing. and we found out that if the question is “will it be better deep fried” the answer is nearly always “yes.” it needed oil changes every 3-4 times unless you make shrimp or something then it got gross fast. And properly fried stuff doesn’t even come out greasy really*. then we figured having a boiling bucket of hot oil on the counter wasn’t the best for, reasons, and got an air fryer. its great, recommend. Plus easier to clean, no oil changes, and if the question is “will if be better in the air fryer” the answers is still, nearly always, yes. *air frying stuff made us realize things like chicken strips are already fried or something before frozen because they still come out kinda greasy. tater tots, frozen french fries… same story.
I can confirm for frozen french fries. The process of making them goes something like this:
1. Peal the potatoes, cut them as uniformly as you can and wash them in water.
2. Put them in boiling water for a couple of minutes to get rid of some starch.
3. Wash them again and put them in the fridge, in a bowl of water.
4. After an hour, or two, put them in hot oil for a couple of minutes, dry them, let them cool down.
5. After they are cooled down, you can either flash freeze them for another day, or put them in the fridge for use after couple of hours.
6. Take them out of the fridge/freezer and fry them in very hot oil until they start to brown a bit.
7. Dry them, let them cool down a bit and then enjoy your crispy-outside-juicy-inside fries.
one of my favorite observations is that the word ‘just’ is often unhelpful. and i think this is an excellent example of it. an air fryer is -j-u-s-t- a small countertop convection oven
Getting extraneous instances of “just” and “simply” out of my lexicon has been simply just a huge just terrible ordeal for just forever
I want to pay-forward the recommendation for watching Technology Connections’ video on Dishwashers. It changed the way that I use our dishwasher, with substantial positive results. I highly recommend if you have a dishwasher in your house that you go watch the dishwasher video(s)
This.
Spoiler – That little bit of extra detergent for the prewash makes a huge difference. As does using a rinse agent.
First world problems…
Third world jealousy.
LMAO but seriously he’s just a first world person trying to seem superior over the other first worlders around him, whom he despises. Many such cases. Also it’s a reddit meme which is really all you needed to know
Hackaday you and I watch the same videos.
BTW we’veen gifted one of those.
Microwave and a heatgun LOL Nice
I won a closed door storage auction for $500 a few years back. Inside was the better part of a commercial kitchen someone had either decommissioned or was accumulating to open. I sold almost everything off and made a tidy profit but one pricey bit of kit I decided to hold onto was a turbochef oven.
It combines top and bottom air impingement, microwave, and infrared cooking. I LOVE IT! I can cook most meats in 3-8 minutes. Bake a tray of brownies in under 10 minutes, and get a decent crust on a 14inch frozen pizza in under 2 minutes or a raw dough pizza in under 4. You can even put metal pans inside without a problem.
I couldnt justify the $21K to buy one new, but if mine died beyond repair I might have to pony up the $3-5K they sell for on the bay to replace it.
It like a fast toaster for sausages that doesn’t need any attention when cooking. Nom nom nom.
An ordinary, plain-old oven is already a “convection oven”, relying on convection of heat radiating from the heating elements through the air in the oven to the food: what you mean is a “fan-forced oven”, where the hot currents of air are forced around the oven with a fan.
An “air fryer” is just a tiny fan-forced oven and there’s nothing magical about them, apart from being a lot smaller in internal volume than an ordinary oven, so taking a lot less time to get up to heat.
I prefer to call them hyper convection ovens. Or tabletop ovens. Or plastic toy ovens.
People here in the Netherlands rave about these.
They love waiting half an hour on a batch of bland tasting soggy “fries” and tell you how healthy it is “because it has no fat”.
First off all the oven or “air fryer” marketed fries are pre-fried and do have fat in them. Often extra fat even.
Second fat is not unhealthy. It’s the carbs.
Third it takes more time and is less tasty.
Fourth some of these fries taste like rice, because they are covered in a rice batter. Gross!
I’m glad I’m not the only one who hates these. We have air-fryer throwing contests here.
I don’t own an “air fryer”. I have a 3200 watt fat fryer that’s filled with a gallon of beef tallow. No fat doesn’t clog your arteries, that’s a myth.
150 grams is a small portion. 200 would be medium and 250 would be large. For several people you easily use up 1000g of fries.
No “air fryer” can do that. My deep fryer does.
Philips Airfryer 5000 Series XXL can typically cook around 1.4 kilograms (approximately 3 pounds) of french fries at once
“can typically cook”
That’s the problem. I don’t want cooked fries, I want deep fried fries.
as an amateur armchair nutritionist, the “fat is fine, the carbs will kill you” is amusing. maybe not wrong per se, but still. I’m old enough to have seen the “zero fat” fad come and go, no we have moved on to the “zero carb” fad. When that goes what’s next? zero protein is about all that is left- fat/carbs/protein is all there is really. I still see keto diets where you have essentially zero carbs and force your body into starvation/ketosis modes. you can smell these people instantly because they smell like diabetics. healthy? you be the judge. the other variant is “caveman” paleo diet. Cavemen had coronary artery disease just like the rest of us. Before the “zero tolerance” mentality, BTW, I recall the idea of a “healthy, balanced diet.” That one makes the most sense to me, anyway. Or rather, caloric monitoring because all three have a caloric equivalent and it is indeed easy to crush a kg of french fries, fat/carb/protein aside that probably isn’t “good” for you.
“Eggs are bad for you! No, wait, just the white part – no! The yellow part. Hold on, eggs are good for you!”
Eggs being unhealthy was an Edward Bernays PR solution to an embarrassing egg shortage in the 20th century. They hired him to spin the issue and make it so people weren’t so angry about price increases, so he hired some doctors to say whatever he wanted them to say. This turns out to be incredibly easy to do. And it still is. “Eight out of ten doctors agree!” It’s an interesting story actually, and intentional misconceptions around that subject persist among otherwise serious nutritionists to this day.
Eggs are about the most perfect single nutritional source known to mankind. They evolved for hundreds of millions of years to contain exactly what’s needed for a growing organism.
I was talking about fries. Fries have a high glycemic index. After a large portion of fries many people feel a “food coma”. Adding some fat to fries, by frying them and by adding mayonnaise you balance it out. But people think it’s healthy because they cut out the fat. Fat also satiates more.
Most people aren’t using beef tallow, they’re using oils that used to be considered unfit for human consumption until synthetic furniture polish and paint bases were invented and the titanic industrial output of various non-petroleum oils was sent looking for a new market
Maybe it doesn’t affect you, but many people have found that the only way to eat few enough calories that they don’t gain weight is if they either go around starving all the time, which is impractical to say the least, or if they adjust what kinds of things they eat. That typically means things with a better ratio of how long it takes to digest versus the calorie content are what they need to eat, and while fat doesn’t digest quickly it also has so many calories that it’s entirely reasonable to try and reduce it where possible. So, lean meat and some beans is better than a plate of fried white rice.
I have made cake in an air fryer. It can be done. Those Betty Crocker packs come out just fine in an aluminum foil “pan”. Corned beef hash is easy, too. One just needs to adjust the recipe; usually lower the temperature and increase the time by a little bit. I have found the cooking instructions for fryer-ready food to be a little on the hot side – at least with my unit; they often come out burnt; dishes like battered shrimp, chicken nuggets, and of course, fries.