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Featured Image Credit: Joanne Dale/Matthew Ashmore/Alamy Stock Photo
Topics: Food and Drink, Hacks, Christmas
Jess Hardiman
Topics: Food and Drink, Hacks, Christmas
The trusty air fryer has become one of the most popular kitchen gadgets in recent years, not only providing a healthier solution, but also a cheaper one.
The nifty countertop appliances use convection to circulate hot air around the food, which in turn gets cooked from all sides simultaneously.
You only need a little oil – or even none at all, if you’re so inclined – to get the crispy result often found with deep-frying, while they’re much cheaper to run that a conventional oven.
Better still, air fryers are versatile as hell, meaning people have been using them to make everything from roast potatoes to, erm, ‘pasta chips’.
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And now that the festive period is around the corner, some fans are even planning to use theirs to cook the whole Christmas dinner. Yes, really.
Posting about the idea in the Family Lowdown Tips and Ideas Facebook group, one user wrote: “You just know somebody’s gonna air fry an entire Christmas Dinner this year.”
And lo and behold, they were right.
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Posting a photo of two air fryers side-by-side, one person commented: “Already got it planned out lol.”
Someone else then replied: “Me too but mine are instant air fryers, and I have three pressure cookers too so I have every base covered. They don’t all live in the kitchen though because I have a tiny kitchen. They just visit when needed.”
Another added: “I hang my head in shame because I have four instant pots (one’s a crisp), three air fryers, a bread machine, Kenwood etc – and we have the tiniest of kitchens.”
A fourth wrote: "Definitely doing the turkey crown and roasties in mine lol."
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The original post has also racked up 6,400 likes and 2,300 comments, suggesting the idea is a pretty popular one.
The method has already had the thumbs up from YouTuber family the Butlers, aka Butlers Empire, who road tested it by cooking various components in their air fryer, including the turkey joint, pigs in blankets, stuffing balls, roast potatoes, cauliflower cheese and even Yorkshire puddings.
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The only catch was that they had to put everything in the oven to stay warm as the rest cooked, but the result seemed to be a winner either way.
"That is what Christmas is all about, folks," Martin Butler said to the camera as he tucked in.
If you're not confident about what can and can't go into your air fryer, Jenny Tschiesche, author of The Air Fryer Cookbook, explains that it's actually pretty simple.
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“Anything you can put in an oven you can put in an air fryer and typically you're going to take away about 20 percent of the cooking time and about 20C," she told the BBC.
“You can cook a turkey crown if the basket is at least 7-8 litres capacity. You could add pigs in blankets towards the end of cooking too.”
And if you don’t have an air fryer but do have a slow cooker, you could always get the roasties done – as Facebooker Ria McCullough recently did, sharing the incredible results online.
McCullough explained how she uses Navan potatoes, saying: "I parboiled potatoes for 10 minutes then steam dried. While they were cooling down slightly I added a few glugs of mild olive oil into the slow cooker."
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After parboiling the spuds, she put the slow cooker on high so that the oil was hot when she added the potatoes in.
"I added a shake of peppers, sage, flour, onion granules & salt to the potatoes and shook them a bit,” McCullough continued.
The potatoes were then tossed in hot oil and left on high for four hours, with a tea towel under the lid – that traps the condensation, which helps create that amazing golden-brown colour on the roasties.