A real miracle worker, must be our best ever purchase.
5/5
Having pancreas problems I have been placed on a very low fat diet (<5%). I have never like just boiled potatoes & veg and was beginning to dread dinner. Cooking and food had become rather miserable. But this air fryer is a miracle worker.
Also as we face a winter energy crisis and huge fuel bills, you can save loads of energy (and money) by using this air fryer rather than your conventional oven and hob.
Important to note is this gets very hot very quickly so reduce cooking temperatures by 10 degrees centigrade, and at first check often - it is much quicker than you expect.
This is a great size for 4 portions, more than that in your family, get the bigger model.
We now use this for cooking my meals with minimum or no fat at all. It makes 'naked oven chips' taste almost like the real deal.
We now also cook a lot of meals for the family, using this. We can do 4 portions of shop bought oven chips, from frozen, in 10 to 15 minutes, and home cut chips in 20. Roasted potatoes for 4, with only 1 small desert spoon of avocado oil (recommended because of its high smoking temperature), came out amazing , and similarly roasted veg for 4 - and what is really special is that I can now eat with the family, and they like the low fat food I am eating, in fact they just don't notice it is low fat.
We read loads of reviews in advance, and have since watched lots of online content of others using Air Fryers to really work out how to use this to the maximum, and we have now massively expanded our cooking using this.
We have purchased (online) an inner rack, and a silicon cake tin for a few pounds, which has really expanded what this air fryer can do.
For example, add 8 sliced carrots on the extra rack - and start cooking at 210 degrees. After 5 mins, reduce to 200 degrees, and add 4 portions of (par-cooked) frozen naked oven chips in the bottom of the pan. 5 minutes later, toss the carrots in on top of the chips, and add 4 small beef or gammon steaks, or 4 large beef burgers on the rack. 5 minutes later, turn them over. Less than 5 minutes later we have an amazing tasty and beautifully cooked low fat dinner for 4. The meat is beautiful - the pork gammon steaks are moist but cooked right through in 6 minutes. It makes beautifully cooked steak with better flavour than frying or grilling. If we add the steaks for just 6 minutes we have a perfectly cooked rare steak - 2mm of browning all over, and a still pink, but not bloody, moist inside., and the carrots and chips get that beautiful steak flavour added to them.
But this doesn't just air fry, as someone said it is basically a very efficient mini oven and anything you can put into an oven you can put into this - just ensure you leave space for the airflow. We have roasted rhubarb and strawberries, we have baked apples, and we have cooked all sorts of fish, meat and veg. We even sterilized jam jars for our jam making, 4 at a time in 2 minutes - which is also the perfect warm up time for this fryer.
We even baked a perfect low fat simnel cake using the silicon cake dish. To keep it low fat we really reduced the marzipan that is in the mixture. In the oven, simnel cake often burns a little due to the marzipan and dries up on the top, but in the air fryer it was cooked evenly all the way through and kept all of its moisture, and there was no loss of flavour, it tasted just like full fat simnel cake but better.
Using the air fryer to its maximum has taken a bit of experimentation, but there are loads of online videos of other cooks trying out ideas, which gave us guidance and some ideas of our own to try out. We made roasted tomatoes and peppers, then added in eggs to poach for 4 minutes to get perfect Turkish Menemen for a 4 person brunch. Next we are experimenting with vegetable soup,
So far nothing has been inedible, and almost everything has turned out better than it would have if cooked using a conventional oven and hob. What is really impressive is the way taste is enhanced, the taste is not just good but excellent.
Having been forced onto a low fat diet, I had lost my appetite, was losing far too much weight, and probably become nutritionally deficient. We have had this less than 3 weeks, and I have put on 4lbs, feel full of energy and look forward to a dinner full of flavour that I want to eat, with my family. All this whilst saving energy and money. As I said, it is a miracle worker.
Stephen Whittle