Speaking of fried foods, it is probably the favorite of many people. The golden appearance, the crispy on the outside, the tender and juicy taste, and the scent that blows on the face will cause many foodies to move their index fingers everywhere. 

However, regardless of the safety of edible oil, even cooking at home still cannot change the inherent properties of high fat, high calorie, and high cholesterol in fried foods. That is to say, they are ultimately not related to health. At this time, many people were unconvinced, and they couldn’t wait to move out a small kitchen appliance that was hot recently and focused on the healthy and oil-free concept, which is the air fryer.

So the question is, is the air fryer useful?

Well, today we will take the time to discuss it.

The cooking principle of air fryer

To know whether the air fryer is good or not, of course, you must first understand how it works.

We all know that ordinary fried food in the oil pot looks like this.

While an air fryer uses air to replace the hot oil in the original frying pan and heats it with convection similar to solar hot air. The hot air forms a rapid circulation of heat in the airtight pan to make the food cooked. At the same time, the hot air blows away. The moisture on the surface of the food allows the ingredients to achieve a similar frying effect without boiling oil.

To sum it up, it is nothing more than the following three steps:

1. The air is quickly heated by the baking device on the top of the machine.

2. A rapid circulating heat flow is formed inside the fryer through a high-power fan.

3. The special texture inside the fryer forms a vortex heat flow, which touches the surface of the food at 360 degrees in all directions, and quickly removes the water vapor generated by heating, thereby forming a golden and crisp surface layer on the surface to achieve the appearance and taste of frying.

If you still don’t understand, then we might as well make up the process of heating the ingredients in the air fryer into this process in a small sealed space, using a high-temperature hairdryer to continuously blow 200 degrees of high-speed strong hot air through the hot air. The collision directly conducts heat to the food.

The air fryer is essentially a small oven

Because it uses the principle of air convection heating, and the merchants have been advocating less frying or even no frying gimmicks, the air fryer naturally captured the hearts of many cooks as soon as it was launched.

In fact, the so-called air fryer is nothing new. In essence, it is like a small oven with high-speed hot air convection, which will take away the moisture on the food surface and simulate the taste of frying, but don’t expect it. It can completely replace frying.

Of course, compared with traditional household ovens, its advantages are also obvious:

1. The air fryer does not need to be preheated, and the heating efficiency is high. If the oven at home is a common size of 30L, the heat machine must be heated for half an hour. This does not seem to be a pleasing thing for hungry meals, but with an air fryer, there is no such trouble. Just put the food in. For example, chicken wings, crispy meat. It usually takes more than ten minutes to complete a dish.

2. The air fryer occupies a small area. If the kitchen area is not large at home, the large oven will take up a lot of space, but the air fryer is usually slightly larger than a rice cooker, which is very easy to move.

But it also has some obvious disadvantages:

1. The price is too expensive, which can buy two ovens.

2. The kitchen is noisy. Imagine it is difficult to put a full-speed blower in the kitchen without making a sound.

3. The internal cooking space is small and the range of dishes is limited. If someone at home wants to roast a whole chicken one day, it is obviously useless to count on the air fryer.

Then, after clarifying the advantages and disadvantages of the air fryer, the next thing to do is to judge whether you need to start according to your own needs.