Maybe. That could work. I was thinking something like polymerization.
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I was interested in the air fryer. How often am i going to use it , will it sit on the counter permanently ? Maybe one of these days. It would be stored next to the sous vide . Im not using it as much when i first purchased it . But find it valuable when needed
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And from what I’ve seen air fryers take up a lot of counter space too.
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A few years ago my sisters bought me an air fryer. They had the foresight to also gift me a cabinet on wheels to hold it. I have yet to even plug it in (the fryer, not the cabinet 
I’m lurking here in hopes of finding some inspiration to actually use it. I admit the thought of cleaning another appliance has been a hurdle I’m trying to get over.
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We bought a really small one, but haven’t used it much. We did chicken wings, which turned out well, and also homemade fries - pretty damn tasty! I want to try rice vermicelli in there, for Mongolian Beef, to avoid all the grease splatter and mess. Ours isn’t too hard to clean, we put the basket in the DW. Again, it’s small, no racks, just a basket.
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Mine took up too much counter space… It now resides in the back of my pantry on the floor. If I need it, I’ll dig it out.
If it stops working, I will not replace it.
When I purchased it, I thought I would use it more, but that didn’t happen.
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Yes, definitely.
And they are LOUD.
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I use my air fryer much more than I thought I would but almost never for anything more than what I would call convenience foods–frozen fries, tater tots, etc., frozen onion rings, frozen battered fish fillets and fish sticks, battered frozen shrimp (my favorite air fryer seafood), hot dogs, corn dogs, egg rolls, potstickers/gyoza. Those are mainly what I use it for. I use it to reheat pizza. I’ve cooked frozen pizza in it but playing with the temperature and timing to get that right is more fiddle-y than what I like. I’ve baked potatoes, but I prefer my usual method of microwaving for a few minutes then finishing in a 400-425° F oven for that.
I don’t use parchment liners for most things, but some foods seem worse than others about exuding oily, sticky substances. I first ran into that with egg rolls, so I always use liners with those. Mostly I use liners just to make clean up easier with some things. Yeah…i’ve had the burning liner experience, too. I can’t remember what, but it was some food that was light enough to get blown around in the air fryer causing the edge of the liner to be pushed up toward the heating element. I make my own liners by rolling parchment paper into a thin cylinder, flattening it, punching holes in it, and cutting it to size.
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My air fryer is a function on my Smart Oven Air, so while it is a bigger unit, at least I use it a lot as a second oven too.
Love the parchment suggestion and will have to try that. The basket that comes with the Breville is horrible to clean. It’s as if they sought out the design and materials most likely to rip up your sponge.
If Pam is not your oil of choice, there’s a nice avocado oil in a can option at Costco that does a good job in coating your food too. Outside of reheats and frozen foods, I’ve mainly used it for breaded foods to replace pan frying or shallow frying. My sister regularly cooks steaks in her fryer and loves that.
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I think of it as a tiny hot box oven - quicker and faster than big oven or toaster oven. I do have plenty of counter space for the appliance ‘collection’.
Salmon, chicken pieces, tofu (best method without frying), veg, toast, a great job on Kenji’s crispy roast potatoes - I do use it quite a bit. And always put it in the DW after a quick rinse.
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This pretty precisely describes our use of it.
I hadn’t thought about trying to put a parchment liner in that you and I think at least a couple of others have mentioned. Does it restrict airflow much? Mine has expanded metal open basket below and solid sides, so most of the airflow is one of up/down or down/up.
I once had a couple of pepperoni slices come loose from a piece of pizza and get up into the heating element and scorch. Yuck.
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Some parchment lines have holes; others don’t.
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I’ve only used parchment liners with holes in them. That doesn’t seem to restrict air flow much. They also make silicone liners with holes in them, but I’ve never tried those.
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Tonight I experimented with air frying a selection of things that I had in small quantities. Ridding my freezer of the remnants was Job One.
There were lumpia, chicken wings, potstickers, and tater tots. I reheated some leftover pizza as a second batch.
It was all good. The pizza was the star–the crust crisped nicely. The wings were surprisingly good and also crisped pretty well. The lumpia didn’t brown much at all, the tots stayed soggy, and the potstickers simultaneously burned and stayed soggy.
I’m sure ideal time and temperature settings vary, so I may have erred in cooking the small bits together. I’ll practice…
In looking for extra trays, Amazon told me that there’s a Breville air fry how-to/cookbook that’s commonly bought with the trays. Anyone here have it?
My experience is that potstickers are kinda a bitch. From what I’ve read, the next time I try them will be a fry, followed by a “little” water covered, and then uncover and cook 'till the water evaporates.
Obviously you can’t do all this in the AF, but you can do the initial fry (so it is just one more pan to clean) (c;
I think the thin, pinched seam on a potsticker is the main problem–it just overbrowns too quickly in the AF.
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Yup… in fact any kind of fry. Under do the fry, then steam, and you can redo the fry without nuking it. At least that is what I have researched (yet to try it). (c;
I am gonna try this next week so feel free to hold off until you can check out my results.
Yes, you’re undoubtably right–when I’m deepfrying potstickers, the “lips” do brown faster and darker than the bodies. When they start to overbrown, out the dumplings come. It just comes with the territory.
However, tonight in the AF, there really wasn’t much browning happening on the bodies by the time the “lips” started to blacken. I’m not used to such a high contrast between the two when just frying.
Please post how your tries turn out.
There’s a lot of experimentation with the air fryer. First time I cooked potstickers, the edges were much more browned than I like. Lower temperature and a longer cook improved them quite a bit. Flipping them partway through the cooking time helps, too.
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There are a zillion of those cookbooks, all by people I’ve never heard of, and many suspiciously using “healthy” in their titles. Maybe I’ll bite the bullet and get a kindle version of one of them. I do have one of those magnetic spiral bound booklets that are mostly temperature guides stuck on the fridge.
Breville has its own cookbook with about 2 dozen recipes. I forget, but maybe it was included with the oven. It’s downloadable as a pdf if anyone is interested:
Edit: I was using the “look inside” feature of some of the “highly rated” cookbooks, and found some strange phrases, as if someone was using generic air fryer text, and someone else wasn’t proofreading:
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To check on your food, use the included tongs to open the door and take a look inside. Be careful of hot steam when opening the door! (no tongs come with the Breville)
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To store your Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, just unplug
it and put it back in its box. It’s that simple! (huh?) -
Once everything is spotless, reassemble the drawer and racks and replace them in the oven. (there is no drawer in the Breville)
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