Virtually any dish you're about to nuke in the microwave will be better in an air fryer. It can re-crisp, re-melt and revive food without turning it into rubber. Plus, it does it super fast. This goes for everything from leftovers to refrigerated and frozen packaged foods.
Tips: For leftovers, place the food in one of the air fryer inserts and set the machine at 350 degrees F for 5 minutes as a starting point. (You'll want to tinker with the temperature and time until you hit the right combination that works for you.) For packaged foods, follow this general rule: Reduce the temperature recommended for an oven by 25 percent and reduce the cooking time by 20 percent, checking for doneness early on.
While most people like air fryers for their ability to cook up crispy fried foods with no oil, the color and taste of your dinner will be dramatically improved with just a little. Spray breaded foods with a little nonstick cooking spray, lightly brush meats with a little vegetable oil, and toss vegetables with just enough olive oil to make them shiny. The fat in the oil will promote even browning and help seasonings stick to the food.
Beer batter on fried fish cooks up to a crispy shell when you fry in oil. But in an air fryer there is nothing to set a wet batter — it will just drip off while the food cooks. If you're after crunch, dredge your food in flour, egg and breadcrumbs instead.
Rice, pasta and other grains are sublime when tossed with a little oil and crisped up in the air fryer — but they must be cooked on a stovetop or rice cooker first. Why can't you cook grains in an air fryer pan insert? The heating coil and fan will never get the temperature inside the machine hot enough to boil the water and allow the grains to cook.
Ingredients for Fried Shrimp:
Nonstick cooking spray
1 pound large shrimp (16/20 count), peeled and deveined, tails on
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 large eggs
1 cup panko breadcrumbs
Spicy Remoulade Sauce:
1/2 cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons chopped pickled jalapeƱos
2 tablespoons whole grain mustard
1 tablespoon ketchup
1 tablespoon hot sauce
1 scallion, thinly sliced
Directions:
Special equipment: a 3.5-quart air fryer
For the fried shrimp: Spray the basket of a 3.5-quart air fryer with cooking spray and set aside. Pat the shrimp dry between a couple paper towels, then season with a pinch of salt and a few grinds of black pepper.
Whisk the flour with 3/4 teaspoon salt and few grinds of pepper in a shallow bowl or baking dish. Whisk the eggs with a pinch of salt in another shallow bowl. Add the panko to a third shallow bowl. Dip a shrimp in the seasoned flour, shaking off any excess, then dip in the beaten eggs, Dredge in the panko, turning until evenly coated.
Transfer to a large plate or a rimmed baking sheet and repeat with the remaining shrimp.
Preheat the air fryer to 385 degrees. Working in batches, place some of the shrimp in a single layer in the fryer basket, then spray lightly with more nonstick cooking spray. Cook until the shrimp are golden brown and cooked through, flipping halfway through, about 10 minutes.
For the spicy remoulade sauce: Meanwhile, stir together the mayonnaise, pickled jalapeƱos, mustard, ketchup, hot sauce and scallion in a small bowl until smooth. Serve with the fried shrimp for dipping.
Note: You may need to fry the shrimp in 2 to 3 batches, depending on the size of your air-fryer basket.
Tips: If you're thinking about buying an air fryer, you might be wondering what the difference is between air fryers and convection ovens. The quick answer is, an air fryer is a simply a smaller convection oven with a catchy name.
There is no actual frying going on inside an air fryer—that's because an air fryer cooks food via convection baking.
With actual deep-frying, your food is directly immersed in hot oil. The oil completely surrounds every inch of the food, so it gets uniformly crispy. With ordinary baking, your food gets less crispy, because baking cooks by surrounding your food with hot air and air is not as good a conductor of heat as oil.
Convection baking introduces a fan to the interior of an oven, allowing hot air to be blown around and onto the food. The force of the air thus transfers more heat to the surface of the food, so that it produces more crispiness than an ordinary oven (but still far less than an actual deep-fryer).
So air fryers are, in essence, convection ovens. But that doesn't mean the two are exactly the same. Let's talk about what those differences are.
Note that although many oven ranges offer a convection setting, for this discussion, we're solely comparing countertop convection ovens with air fryers.
What Is a Convection Oven?
A countertop convection oven is built like a standard toaster oven: rectangular in shape with a front door that opens on a hinge at the bottom. How it differs from an ordinary toaster oven is that a convection oven is equipped with a fan, which blows hot air around.
The motion of the air inside the oven is called a convection effect and it results in faster cooking by transferring higher temperatures to the surface of the food as compared with an ordinary oven. So it both accelerates cooking as well as enhances the browning and crisping of the surface of your food.
Like a toaster oven, a convection oven has an interior rack that will fit a sheet pan (preferably a perforated one to allow maximum air flow). Because it's wide, it allows for the food to be spread out on the rack rather than stacked in layers.
This is crucial, since stacking or layering food impedes the flow of hot air. Arranging the food in a single layer allows for even cooking all around.
What Is an Air Fryer?
Essentially, an air fryer is a smaller, more portable convection oven. Instead of being shaped like a toaster oven, many air fryers are tall, closly resembling a coffeemaker. It has a removable bucket with a handle and inside that bucket, fits a removable basket. This basket is where the food goes. The bucket slides into the device, you turn it on, and it starts to cook. The fan is situated overhead, above a heating element.
Now, because it's smaller and the fan is closer to the food, an air fryer is able to focus a high amount of heat onto a relatively small cooking area. Which means that an item of food in that cooking area will cook more quickly than it would in a convection oven.
However, because it is smaller, it will only accommodate a fraction of the amount of food that a convection oven will fit. An air fryer will really only cook about two servings at a time—if that.
This means that if you are trying to feed more than one or two people, you'll have to cook in batches, so that ultimately it may take longer to serve a meal than it would using a convection oven.
This creates a sort of catch-22, since the small size of the basket prevents you from spreading out an even layer of food, so you have to stack your food instead. But by stacking your food, you prevent the hot air from flowing evenly around it, thus defeating the purpose of the convection effect.
Even when used according to the instructions, cooking French fries or onion rings in an air fryer requires you to periodically shake the basket to ensure that all the fries or rings cook evenly. So not only does it take longer to cook (because of having to cook in batches), you also have to physically do more work.
The Pros and Cons of an Air Fryer
With an air fryer, you can't see inside. This might not be super important, but being able to see your food can help judge doneness.
Air fryers are louder than a convection oven. Philips says its air fryer generates 65 decibels, which is about as loud as a vacuum cleaner.
An air fryer is more expensive than a comparable convection oven. A top air fryer might run $250, but a $150 convection oven will cook more food and more varieties of food (including toast.)
Air fryers take up less space. A convection oven will pretty much have to live on your countertop full-time, whereas an air fryer can go in a cupboard when you're not using it (although because of its height, it might not fit in every cupboard).
Air fryer cleanup is more difficult. With an air fryer, you have the perforated basket to clean along with the bucket that it fits in. If you're cooking something like chicken wings, there will be a lot of dripping. With a convection oven, you just clean the pan.
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