MORE CRUMBS.......Air Fryer Fun
It took a while for me to take the plunge and buy an air fryer. Now I'm rather kicking myself for not getting one earlier.
As a cookery writer and food stylist for over 30 years, I have acquired a lot of equipment over time and my kitchen is pretty full. Some items get used over and over for many years, others never move from the back of the cupboard, but it can be oh so hard to chuck out that pasta attachment for the Kenwood chef or that odd shaped cake tin that you bought once and that you just might want to use again.
With the cupboards full to bursting, each new purchase has to really earn its space. And so when the Air Fryers chat and subsequent sales really took off about 18 months ago, thanks in part to the cost of living crisis, I resisted the urge to give them a try. Pushed as an energy-saving device, I told myself as I had a half oven, the savings from using the air fryer instead of the oven alone did not justify the purchase.
But then, at the end of last year, I heard of a survey that said 42% of British households now had an air fryer. Which made me wonder if my readers had them and would want recipes. Perhaps I should be using one so I could help. So I asked in a poll on one of my weekly newsletters here on Substack who had one and more than 50% who answered said yes and another 3% said they wanted to get one soon.
I’m going to be honest. I was still a bit skeptical. I wasn’t convinced I would use it that much, but I thought as a professional cookery writer writing for the home cook, I should at least check them out.
So I purchased a Ninja one drawer fryer, based on it being mid priced and a Which best buy back in November last year. And I LOVE IT.
I found it more far more useful than I thought, and the results much better than I expected. Indeed, I use it several times a week now, and the only thing stopping me from using it every day is the size. Mine is a perfect size for two people but more often than not I am cooking for more. So now I find myself contemplating getting a larger two-drawer air fryer or a second one, but where oh where would I put it?
As with any new equipment there is period of learning through experimentation which I have been doing in the few months I have had it. Some have been great successes, and others have not been so great.
Some Air Fryer Successes
Everyone knows they have a great reputation for chips. Oven baked potatoes in the form of wedges, chunks or chips have long been popular with my family, now I can cook them in less time with less fat so that’s a double win.
Jacket potatoes cook quicker with a crispier skin, and you can save even more time if you start them in the microwave before transferring them to the air fryer to crisp up the skins.
We quite often have fish and chips on a Friday. It is the one takeaway treat that Mr B really likes, and popping the chips in the air fryer for just a couple of minutes is a great way to give them the straight-out-the-fryer crispness again.
But it's not just potatoes that cook well in the air fryer. Fish also cooks really well in the air fryer, so this is my new go-to way to cook fish. It is easier than pan frying and just as quick.
I have not cooked much meat yet, but I was brave enough to cook a small rib of beef joint over Christmas, which my youngest son said was the best I’d ever cooked. (I'm kicking myself for not making a note of the time or temperature.)
And they are great for cooking sausages.
I’ve also been experimenting with a bit of baking and I cooked a very successful 15cm (6in) fruit cake. It didn’t save a lot of time but it saved putting on the whole oven just for one small cake.
and Air Fryer disasters
I couldn’t resist trying to cook eggs in the air fryer. My first attempt was poached eggs and placed each egg in a ramekin with some water. The water evaporated, the yolk cooked on top from the direct heat before the white was set and they stuck to the ramekin.
I then tried cooking eggs in the shell. Why? Well, while boiling an egg is easy enough, I thought being able to preset the time to cook your egg perfectly might be useful. I tried hardboiled eggs, and all was good until I came to peel them. Try as I might, I just couldn’t get the shells off. It was as if they had baked hard onto the whites. Don't they look in a sorry state?
I might try a soft “boiled” egg at some point, but then again, I might not bother!
Then I tried Toad in the Hole. My instincts tell me that the air fryer should be good for Yorkshire pudding batter and I think with some experimenting I can get there but its not such a straightforward conversion from conventional cooking. Getting the size of the dish and quantities right will need more work.
Sharing my Air Fryer Journey
Whilst I am not yet an air fryer expert, I am very good at writing and sharing easy-to-follow recipes, and I understand a lot of the science behind cooking. Now that I am more familiar with my air fryer, I shall be writing recipes specifically for it.
As it takes a lot of time to prepare a full-blown post for my blogs Recipes Made Easy and Only Crumbs Remain, in order to get more recipes to you quickly, I shall instead publish them along with some other non-air fryer recipes here on Substack for my paid subscribers.
If you would like to get these extra recipes which (I hope to publish fortnightly to begin with and eventually increase to weekly) in addition to the free weekly Recipe Crumbs round-up of recipes from my websites, you know what you have to do.
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