To not understand the fuss about air fryers?

[whatthen]

People keep raving about them and I got one as a present and I used it a couple of times and gave up on it. It doesn’t cook food any quicker than a normal cooker.

I’ve tried again today and I’ve now been waiting an hour for a baked potato to cook. Would’ve been done by now in the oven. What is the point? What am I missing?

It took an hour to cook one in the air fryer too.

I do. Always. I’ve used an air fryer twice and been completely underwhelmed both times.

It’s faster, cooks better and is far easier to clean.

It’s also cheaper to run.

I use my oven far less now.

It also makes awesome croutons.

Are you absolutely sure you're using an air fryer, and not a toaster or a sandwich maker OP?

I’ve had two. No idea what the last make was but my parents had the same and raved about it. Did not get the fuss at all.

It’s not me that’s been arguing about it for the last two hours 🤣🤣🤣

It doesn't heat up faster because you set the temperature to max!

That's just the temperature at which it stops heating.

How can you be cooking jacket potatoes in 45 minutes from a cold oven? Are they tiny ones?

We don’t use ours quite as much as I expected to, but where I find it really handy is if it’s just me and particularly for lunch stuff. I like it for things like jacket potatoes (always do six mins in the microwave first).

Yeah sorry OP - you haven’t got a great one there. :-( I’ve got a ninja double drawer and it’s a godsend.

Won't have anyone slagging off Ladas! We had one in the 90s - lots of space, an amazingly comprehensive toolkit and we sold it for cash when it really didn't even have scap value.

I have a cheap airfryer and even it doesn't take 45 minutes to cook fish fingers. It's generally about half the time of my conventional oven.

I’m not furious though. I didn’t realise it would upset so many people.

No, just normal jacket potatoes covered in oil and wrapped in foil. Maybe my oven is good.

OP, I tend to agree with you and I have a pretty standard air fryer - Ninja dual zone. We don’t eat food like frozen chips, chicken nuggets or fish fingers so people saying they can cook these quickly is of no interest to me. I use it mostly to make toast and it really doesn’t take up much more room than a large toaster so I am not bothered by it.

You obviously don’t know how to use it. They come with manual and the good ones, ninja for example, with manuals on how to cook each recipe. They are fast and don’t need babysitting . We bake jacket potatoes easily. Not sure what’s the fuss about how not to use something so simple . It’s a life changer

It’s a small oven. All the air fryer people are very defensive, saying your air fryer is rubbish but they all seem to have rubbish ovens. My oven heats up in a few minutes. It’s a small oven, some people like them but that’s all they are.

Cooking jacket potatoes quickly has changed your life? Microwaves have been doing this for 40 years.

Don't have one if they're not useful to you.

We don't have an oven any more, we find the combination of microwave, drawer style air fryer and bucket style air fryer/slow cooker does all we need.

If it's not cooking things, that's either you not understanding how to use it - for example, putting things in inside a dish that stops air flowing around it or overcrowding it, or say, putting in a huge raw spud and expecting it to cook the inside at the same time as the outside (you would need to use smaller spuds or microwave them a bit first so the inside has a head start).

If you can't cook fish fingers in under 45 minutes... are you putting them in a dish that blocks air flow?

Or, it's defective and not actually reaching the temperature it says it is - which can happen with budget models.

We regularly do baked spuds, chips, wedges, breaded/battered frozen things - in our Ninja two drawer job. It doesn't take as long to reach temp as the electric fan oven used to and cooks those things a bit quicker.

That's not why we have it though, we have it so we can use all our workspace for whatever we want, bringing out whichever appliance we want to use, and because we're using less power to cook things as it is more efficient.

Do you not think that all the people saying theirs are great, and you, the minority saying based on a tiny handful of experiences, that they are crap... might suggest you're incorrect here? That you or your air fryer are the outlier, the anomaly?

Ours cooks food much faster than an oven, food often tastes better, it’s easy to clean and apparently cheaper too.

My DS borrowed my Tower, liked it but found it too small for his larger family. See if you can try someone’s Ninja or Tower which might convert you and save you money OP.

I'm going to straight up say I've not read the whole thread but from the first few pages this is what stick out to me - maybe as much as having a good air fryer, it's about people having a rubbish oven. My oven doesn't take anything like 20 minutes to heat up as kept being repeated in the first few pages - it's more like a quarter of that time.

There are some things it does much better. Salmon fillets cook fantastically and don’t ooze that protein gunk that happens if I try and bake them in the oven. Sausages cook nice and evenly. I’d like to hear other things that cook better not just faster.

Thats why!

Don't wrap them in foil! Give it five in the micro then air fry as is, no foil! Then it'll be lovely and quicker than the oven.

No one is furious.

Not a single poster.

It’s an exchange of opinions.

Opinions that you have asked for that you are responding to in a hostile fashion. Absolutely bizarre 🤷‍♀️

It's useful as a backup to an oven. Or if you just need to cook a single portion of food.

I had halogen ovens before air fryers were even thought of so I'm pretty used to using the technology. I'm currently swapping my dual drawer Ninja for the 6.2l single drawer & the Crispi.