Family say they made entire Christmas dinner in the air fryer

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’.

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.

YouTuber family the Butlers, aka Butlers Empire, road tested the method 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.

YouTube/Butlersempire

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.

“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.”

YouTube/Butlersempire

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."

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.