Is there any point in getting an Air Fryer?

[BarbaraUsher]

The world and his wife seem to have an air fryer. I’d love to save some money on a massive electricity bill, but I don’t know whether it would pay for itself. All I hear is about people cooking their chickens in it.
What do vegans and vegetarians cook in their air fryers?

I have one and to be honest I never use it, my DP uses to cook sausages as he says they cook better in it, besides that I’d never go for it, I think because I only have one drawer and when cooking for a family of 3 I don’t see the point to cook the chips and then go in with chicken or something just seems a lot of faff and cold food, perhaps I’m doing it wrong as everyone swears by them

crispy Tofu
roast sweet potato
chips of any form
roast beans / roast chickpeas

it is v good for small quantities if you are cooking for 1 or 2. not so useful if you are cooking for 4+

Anything you can cook in an oven you can cook in an airfryer in less time and cost . I use mine everyday .

I’m not a vegan, but I don’t think I’ve ever cooked a chicken in mine! I cook roasted vegetables, home made chips and parmentier potatoes, stuffed vegetables, vegetable fritters, pretty much anything I would cook in an oven. If you’d don’t use an oven, then you might not use it regularly, but I love it for roasting vegetables as takes half the time. Great for roasted butternut squash soup.

I find it dehydrates the vegetables too much, presumably because of the air element. My sliced roast aubergines are far nicer when oven roasted.

Honestly, OP, while we’re a vegetarian household rather than vegan, we use the air fryer (we only have a small one, which we bought during a house renovation when we had no kitchen access) for crisping up defrosted cooked food like slices of tortilla or frittata, making chips, cooking veggie sausages or defrost/cooking other bought processed food like halloumi sticks or M and S ‘Indian snacks’. Occasional toasted sandwiches. But it’s certainly not key to our cooking.

We are a mix of meat eaters and vegetarians in our house and the airfryer is used just as much for veggie food as for meat.

When we do a batch cookof chilli (meat and veggie versions) we'll do 10 or 12 jacket potatoes in the oven and then over the subsequent days a jacket pot reheated with a few minutes in the microwave and finished off in the airfryer is much nicer than one reheated with microwave alone.

You can aitfry a basket of chopped peppers to roastiness much more efficiently than in the oven.

Various ricepaper-wrapped things are great in the airfryer - the ones I make soak the rice paper in egg but they work just as well with water or other liquids. Google vegan ricepaper parcel recipes

Basically if you cook anything that is best with a bit of crispiness in its texture, there's a way to do it in an airfryer. It's only pointless if everything you eat is supposed to be wet/mushy textured. Meals with a variety of textures are great to it might be that the main element of the meal is done on the stove but there's a contrasting element you can do in tge airfryer which enhances the whole meal.

Can you bake cakes in it? Or a tray of scones? How does a whole roast dinner fit in it when there's a chicken, roast potatoes, chipolatas, roasted carrots, stuffing etc?
I can't imagine when I would ever use one and they take up so much room on the worktop.

Maybe it’s the type of fryer, but I use the roast function on ours and it doesn’t dehydrate them. I prefer them to oven roasted. It’s also great for roasted cauliflower.

Yes this is exactly what we do. The rice paper things are great. I can’t eat gluten, so I find it really useful.

I use it for everything except a large pizza, that, and Yorkshire puddings are the only thing my oven is used for now.

Mine has a bake function so you can bake in it.

I guess how much you use it as a vegan depends on what kind of things you eat.

I bake small 1lb loaf cakes in mine too. Jacket potatoes, start off in microwave then crisp skin in air fryer, great for heating up samosas and bahjis, homemade chips of any type of veg, wouldn't be without mine. It was a very cheap Asda home brand one and cost £20 which has lasted 3 years so far.

Mine doesn't have any "functions" just heats up or not but temperature is variable. Wondering what I'm missing now.

I have an air fryer and it gets used a lot. But I would say that it does seem to really blast the food, so I have started using it at a lower temperature for a bit longer to stop things coming out too crispy on the outside. I’m not one of those people who never uses their oven though. If I’m cooking a few different things and they will all fit in the oven at once, then that’s what I do, rather than faff around with taking things in and out of the air fryer. Oh and pizza ..! It’s definitely a really great gadget to have though.

It is very useful for teens who want to make their own food as it cooks quickly and they can make their individual stuff whether it is veg/tofu or burger/chips etc. It saves time and energy bills. Battered fish/grilled chicken cooks very fast too.
I would say my teens/YPs alternate between that, pasta and the cheap smoothie maker that has its own bottle as a vessel which they can just take to school.

It's a small convection oven, so while it can bake cakes, it's not great - that blast of circulating air dries cakes out. Not good for cheesecakes or very wet mixes either.

It will do scones and biscuits ok, as they don't need to be as moist to be delicious. I do small batches of shortbread in it sometimes when we have people dropping in.

we've only just got one this month. Have been toying with the idea. We have an open plan bungalow, kitchen at the end of the sitting room,it's tiny,so we have a small trolley with pans, baskets,DH wanted a ninja, I said I didn't want a lump of black plastic in my living room, There's no room on my work top I wanted a coloured one....got it in Lidl pale green matches,toaster cooker. It crisps chips much better than my oven,so quick. Easy to clean, oven is floor height, shelves don't fit in my small round sink. Teenage gks stay most weeks and are in the nuggets and chips phase.

The probe function is great.

DH eats meat and I don't. I jab the probe in the chicken breast or whatever, set the temperature, and bugger off. The air fryer cooks until it reaches the correct inner temperature and turns itself off.

But OP is vegan and she’s asking in the vegan section 🤷‍♀️.

My oven broke 2 years ago and I bake cakes and pavlova, do casseroles, roasts (even the Linda McCartney one that says it’s not suitable for the air fryer it’s lovely done on roast mode) pasta bake everything. My DH is not veggie and I have roasted chicken etc for him.

The thread came up in Active, I didn't realise it was in the vegan section when I did my response, presumably that's the same with this poster.
I don't check what section a thread is in when it comes up in Active.

My apologies. As someone who doesn't "do" meat but has to occasionally accommodate meat eaters, I found it helpful.

But I didn't register it was on the vegan board, not the food topic generally when I saw it in Active.

From the OP, What do vegans and vegetarians cook in their air fryers?

Tofu tofu tofu.
Roast veg
Tofu

What do vegans and vegetarians cook in an oven?

Air fryer should work the same for most things.

Anything I haven't used my air fryer for yet is cakes and biscuits.