One extra thing, the dedicated air fryers exhaust a lot of air while a convection oven recirculates the same air. This makes the air fryer dryer and crispier.
Ooohh, good point, though how precisely the intake cooling air mixes with the "hotbox" air seems hard to work out without a lot of modelling I definitely will not be doing.
@@TechnologyConnectionsI have an instant pot with an air frying/grilling option, and the amount of air expelled seems to be significantly less than the power of the fan. I think the main difference other than the air expulsion, is the speed at which the air is being blown around inside it (which I'm sure when I've finished watching the video I'll find you mentioned :) )
And use more energy. Air fryer owners who keep replying the same thing over and over, I don't care if it's just a tiny bit more energy, go eat your fries and chicken nuggets.
Still, a convection oven does have an exhaust up top to get rid of some moisture. I use the convection/grill-mode that uses the grill heater at the top of the oven, gives my fries that crispy feel and reduces the time needed at the same time.
I'm sure somebody said this the other week but I'll say it too: I always enjoy a video where Alec discusses a box that changes the temperature, and sometimes other key attributes, of its contents.
Man, it really is amazing how much intricacy there is in "Box that changes temperature" in the human ecosystem. Enough Alec practically runs his channel on those alone!
Thank you for continuing to put in enough effort to turn your script into subtitles. Not many channels caption their videos well and It's very appreciated.
Google's auto titling is utterly awful except for when it's amusingly inaccurate. I even found one occurrence where it had turned youtube-friendly speech into bad language.
this, so this. i have like 5 small-ish channels that i love that put in the effort of proper captions when giant chanels just dont which is sad cuz captions are an amazing accecabuility tool and you just know that big channel has the resources to properly caption every vid but they just dont
@@albertbozesan look up the article "Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said" it's very damning towards the accuracy of whisper
Please never stop. It is nice to get a peek into how these machines work when I want to be an informed buyer, as well as feeding the curious cat in me. Thank you.
An air fryer is the perfect no-preheat oven for bachelor portions. I use mine all the time. Don't try degreasing the drawer with hot water and drain cleaner though - 'cos all the non stick coating comes unstuck and you end up with a shiny metal drawer instead.
Ever since I started using air fryer liners, I've never gone back. There's a few drawbacks depending on which ones you get but as long as you always use them the basket will stay pretty clean. Best bet is to use one without holes below the false floor, and one with holes above it.
Air fryers are SO convenient for me as a disabled person. It’s faster, I don’t have to bend down to reach an oven, I’m less likely to burn myself, and when you drop baskets they tend to keep the food inside! Plus our oven is super basic.
My dad had significant mobility issues, and while I'm sad he isn't around to enjoy their conveniences, I feel joy knowing you get to. Inclusiveness rules.
Same here! I have arthritis in my spine & hands & using the oven is quite difficult for me. Small, countertop appliances like the air fryer are so helpful.
it when microwave, first came out and promo's, bleb, that they could cook anything, in excepted practise onlt ever warmed cold coffee, and defrosted frozen food, and conventual oven still ended up doing everything else, My has taken over all cooking duties, except pizzas, and that mainly and thing where its size problem?
We bought an airfryer for multiple reasons. The most important ones are speed and cost of running. We have a full on stove oven that pulls 5kW and has to be on for 20 min before actually being warm. Then add whatever you wanted to ... 'oven' and youre at 25 maybe 30 minutes total. 2/3's of the time is just heating the oven (and kitchen... especially in summer...). Also we pay around 40-45 cents / kWh so that adds up REALLY fast. The airfryer is warm in 2 minutes and pulls just 1100W. I can throw some bake-off rolls in there and they will literally be done in 8 min. It takes less than 1/3 of the time of the oven while pulling almost 1/5th of the energy (also considering that once the airfryer is warm the heating element turns off).
@@dreddwailing5505I agree and do that from time to time but be careful guys... I've gotten myself into situations where I forgot that the food is still in the oven at a very high temperature, even if the oven is turned off... Needless to say: burnt food.
@@nowionlywantatriumph There was (is?) an actual product called Dietz Nuts. It was bite-size pieces of cured meat lmao, all I really remember is I really really really didn't like one of the spices they used in it.
The thing about getting good at something is that it requires less and less 'effort' to do well the better you get. This is the most obvious when you look at competitive pvp gaming, often people who do very well get called 'sweats' because it is presumed that those people sweat their asses off working super hard to execute complicated advanced strategies and complicated movement patterns. But the reality is that those players play like that completely effortlessly due to practice and experience. The same kind of thing is going on here, he's been making videos so long hes got so much experience with the process that it would be more effort to cut more of the corners on it than it would be to simply go with whatever the regular process is for the most part.
16:40 I believe there's a special place in hell reserved for the person that started the trend of putting objectively terrible touch controls into every appliance.
I hope you are right! I particularly despise touch pad interfaces in rooms where my hands might be wet or greasy. Like in the kitchen or bathroom. Yuck!
Very fun with our washing machine and dryer, both appliances where the touch controls won't work with cold or damp hands. Which practically will never happen when handling wet laundry ...
I did not expect this video to be positive on Air Fryers but you are one of the few people I trust to actually closely look at the pros and cons of such devices ^^ I own a smaller full oven and it does "air frying" better than any full sized- or Toaster- oven I've used
I used to be in the "it's just a convection oven" camp - obviously it's literally true mechanically, but the specific parameters of amount of air movement relative to cooking cavity size are important. It's like saying "A shovel is just a wide pickaxe" - literally true, they both impact and scoop and are made of a metal head and wood handle, but that width parameter is transformative.
Are they due now have the toaster oven variety which can convection bake as well as air fry ad all the normal toaster oven functions. Like most toaster ovens you can even do conventional baking without the fan..
It is not literally true mechanically. Because the air frier's mechanism is built so that it imports air from the outside, and dumps out the hot & damp air that has taken up moisture. But yes, the exact amount of airflow and overall aerodynamics do matter too. Like when he had a drip-tray under the basket blocking the air-flow from the fan below it. Also probably other factors matter too (maybe how much radiative heat is transferred from black-body radiation, and such?).
@@feha92 I like the term "imports air." I understand it may be technically correct, but I can imagine a Storybots episode where something inside of the air fryer is putting in a parcel request for some fresh imported air.
@@feha92 that's a couple fair points. If we made a category of devices that are"box that gets hot", a regular toaster is one where radiant heat dominates, heat is very high, air movement is next to none. A conventional oven, only natural convection, convection is the dominant heating method unless you're on the top rack on broil (radiant heat definitely matters there). A convection oven, some forced air movement, it's enough to stir the chamber up significantly more, but it's a dinky fan and a big chamber, only slightly different than conventional oven. Air fryer, the thing sounds like a jet engine with its powerful fan for such a tiny chamber, it blasts with dry air from the outside. You could put all this in a weird 3D space, with the axes being chamber size, air flow rate, exchange rate with outside air.
I didn't think much of them. But I kept hearing how much people loved theirs so I bought one. One of the best appliance purchases I've ever made. I use it way more than the oven or toaster oven. Crazy handy. Sometimes... and I don't believe I'm admitting this... when everyone says something is great... it actually is!
Same here. Was expecting this to be another "hot pot" or whatever the fad before it was. In reality, I've just relegated my full-size oven to an appliance I only use to make Thanksgiving turkey.
@@gorak9000 I just got one, mainly because people who bought them a few year ago are still using theirs and find them really useful. So it is still a thing.
I've actually lost weight cooking my bacon and other such fatty-cooked food in these instead of a frying pan! Dad wasn't convinced either but he bought a semi-broken one (the timer is wonky). Needless to say we have another two waiting in the cupboard for this one to die over a year later XD
Crispyness: one thing worth noting that may explain why air fryers became popular despite convection ovens existing for so long, is how you actually make that desirable "crispy/crunchy tasty texture". It's not just HEAT. It's a combo of heat and moisture. In order to get the desirable malaird reaction, you need to get it up to a pretty high temperature (up to 330F) which is well above boiling. But if there is any moisture in your food, the water will actually prevent the internal food temperature from going above boiling. The more heat energy you put in, the water will "steal" from the food and use it to evaporate. So in order to effectively crisp your food you need to dry it out/remove moisture. In reality it's a combo of dry it out, and provide high heat at the same time. This is the real challenge. As mentioned in the video, air is a poor conductor of thermal energy. There just aren't a lot of air molecules to bump into your food to give it heat. Which is why hot cooking oil works great in a traditional deep fryer. It surrounds the food with lots of hot molecules to bump into (and transfer heat). Plus since steam floats in oil, when the moisture evaporates out of the food as steam, it bubbles up to the surface and leaves. This creates convection currents in the oil, meaning the hot oil is circulating so your food is always bathed in a fresh supply of super hot oil. So to get air working as close to oil as possible, you don't just need a fresh supply of super heated air, you also need a way to quickly remove that moisture. The best air fryers have very intentionally designed internals to get the optimal air circulation patterns that provide fresh, hot air evenely over the food surface AND to carry away moisture and remove it from the air. Which explains why not all devices are created equal. HEAT + FAN is not enough to result in a good cooking experience. (As I've personally found, smaller units tend to perform better, as smaller areas are easier to maintain high heat and are more forgiving with airflow currents).
@@rosiefay7283 Great point! this is where the more close up view of the chemistry that is happening comes in handy. The basic idea is the temperature inside the oven isn't uniform. It might be 330F at the element, or 330F at the thermostat, but it could (and usually has to be) lower near the food. Plus, and this is the tricky part. If there is any moisture in the food, it will stay at 220F and won't go any higher, until the moisture has evaporated. This evaporation actually takes a relatively large amount of energy, so just evaporating the water will take a LOT of heat away from that 330F air. The higher the air temp the faster it will evaporate, and you need to evaporate before you can get the delicious crisp/browning. Also note, that if you evaporate too slow, (ie at too low a temp) then what you end up doing is drying out the food and not browning it. So it gets crunchy, but in a dessicated dried out jerky sort of way, and less that delicious crisp. (And for a french fry you want crispy on the outside and moist in the middle. If the whole thing is dried through then it'll just be a dried potato, which is way less appetizing). So the magic of an air fryer (why they call it "frying" at all) is that it tries to mimic what happens in a deep fryer. Convection currents of hot oil swirling around your food, heating it up and carrying away steam/moisture. But since there is no oil they have to do it with air. And air is way more diffcult/less forgiving so it's necessarily not going to work as well. (And be much more challenging to do it right). As a side note: look at any guide to tell you when your meat/fish/food is done, and see what internal temp you are looking for. (Eg. 150F, 160F, 170F etc). You'll notice none of them are that hot (they are all, well under boiling), even though your oven or gill might be set to 450F or higher. The temperature you cook at is NOT the same temperature your food is at. Which is the entire challenge of cooking. How to transfer enough heat into your food, to get it to the desired temperature, at the desired pace, to make it taste good. It's why sous veide cooking is also an interesting work around to this.
From a cook perspective, if you are doing baking, like bread, cookies or a cake, baking in an oven by convection ovens works better. If you are doing convection baking for fish, chicken, fries or veggies, an air fryer works better, weirdly. Why? Smaller space, more air intake, and a stronger heating element cranked to max with air moving over it does 2 main things. First, heating the food from overhead, providing direct heat. But second, it works as a heat pump, moving the hot air out, and with it, the humid air from removing moisture from the food. So, that makes it also...a crappy too high temp dehydrator! That...actually is why it works super well? Weirdly? As for why air fryers are actually good to a cook, and why most of us who work in the industry encourage em? Good for cooking for 2 people, like a small piece of salmon on a night off, and it reheats leftover fries from the local diner perfectly. Reheated fries in a home appliance? Worth the money, period.
The smaller space is also easier to manage the temperature in. A normal oven pretty much has to make a guess about what temperature the food is at since all its sensors are on the exterior of the massive box full of air, but if there is less space in that box then it has a better shot at holding the temperature at where it needs to be at.
Yes! One thing that has always bothered me with conventional ovens is that they're designed to be the size of a car trunk. You can bake a not-so-small child in there. It may be good to have the option to do that once a year, but for my everyday cooking I bake like... 300 grams of food. 1 kilogram, tops. It's a brick sized portion usually.
I dont get the appeal of a device which can only really make one shape of bread. Sure you can put in different mixtures to make different breads, but learning to bake is worthwhile and you get better results.
@@strayiggytv My $45 Breadmaker consists of a bucket, a heating element and a turning thingy to knead the dough, from what I've seen the more expensive breadmakers don't really add anything. I mean sure everything is a bit nicer, but I suspect it's like with air fryers, and spending more doesn't really get you a whole lot more. After all the cheapest breadmaker I could find on amazon at the time bakes really good bread, rivaling what I can get from bakeries in my area (depending on my recipe ofc)
@@arnoldkotlyarevsky383 baking is awesome but most people buy a regular loaf of bread like once a week and being able to just throw some flower, water, salt, and sugar in a machine and have it produce that loaf of bread every week but taste better for a cheaper price appeals a lot to me. I don't have a bread machine thats just my 2 cents
So to put it simple. They are just better convection ovens. I use one of the mid range ones that has a few extra settings and a double basket. It’s great for cooking things especially when you don’t want the oven heating up the house on a hot day. It also tends to cook a little faster and more evenly compared to a traditional oven.
As an one person household, an air fryer has been a really great tool! Effective and efficient at cooking small portions. Just make sure to pick a model that is easy to clean!!! Not just the basket, but also the oven NEEDS CLEANING.
I have a Philips, it's kinda hard to clean. So I picked up a 2nd one from a thrift store that looked almost new, as if it was only used maybe once. Let's see if this one is better, although I forgot which brand it is.
I just use aluminum foil under most of my frozen food unless I want it extra crisp. It prevent any grease from reaching the container, and after you finish heating, you can just plop it out. It reduce the washing frequency to about once a month since it no longer smell
@RoseArkana Well somehow I've completely missed it and I've been watching YT for as long as it's been out. I know of no nuts November so I understood that was the only thing.
@@jul1440 Skip em. They're trying to be too many things at once. I got a bucket and my mother got a more expensive Toaster Oven +, mine is quicker crispier and easier to clean.
@@mzaite Mine does not toast, just air fry and rotisserie, but it does do both excellently. The front door comes off completely for easy cleaning. I think it is called Instant Vortex or something like that.
Ive been largely critical over air fryers as well. But. As someone who doesnt have a convection oven and hates heating up the whole oven in the summer. Maybe i should consider one. Pleasantly suprised to hear your conclusion as well!
i was also a bit sceptical of them until i got one, then i started going from "well this is fine actually" to "oh this is neat" and now i genuinely think it's something most regular people should have. It's like how you can definitely make coffee without a drip brewer, but they're just so monstrously convenient and cheap enough that the only things that should really put you off having one is: knowing that you'd never really use it (yeah right), or simply not having the space for one (they are annoyingly big).
Air speed is definitely relevant. I worked in a cooled meat product factory for years i. Production and R&D. There is a convection oven, and there is an impingement oven. Convection moves some of that cold air, impingement ovens pretty well obliterate it. We used that and live steam to get the intended looks texture and cook as efficiently as we could as quickly as we could, retaining as much weight as we could. 1% of a million lbs of product is pretty important.
I am so glad someone else mentioned impingement! I cleaned ovens for a national pizza chain. Impingement ovens are awesome. We could cook an entire large pizza in 6 minutes from raw. All that's used is hot air. We also cooked all sorts of things. Raw chicken spread out on a tray cooked in about 8 minutes. With my first air fryer I instantly saw the same tech, just not as direct.
@@chemmerling yeah, millions of pounds of product at the place I worked. Various sausage, beef crumbles, meatballs mostly and mostly to go to pizza chains you've heard of. It's fine to work with giant equipment and see the cure little 10 hp grinder at a butcher shop that's similar to the small one I used in the R&D lab.
@@Bradimus1 ok so whenever a professional leaves a comment like yours on a video I end up falling down a rabbit hole because I start googling and ... so now I am wondering if a spiral oven is a type of impingement oven or not. I can hardly cook and here I am unable to let this go haha It seems like it is because the one I am looking at blasts the food with hot air along its journey.
@bsadewitz there are lots of types of industrial cooking methods. Most impingement ovens I've seen are a tunnel, not a spiral. It not the path the food takes that makes it an impingement ovens, it's the fast, high volume of hot air being directed at the food that's completely removing the boundary layer of cold air. I'd liken it to 1.5 gallons per minute from a kitchen faucet, vs 1.5 gallons per minute from a 1200 psi pressure washer. It just going to be able to bring the temp of the food up much faster and brown much better.
The biggest selling point for an air fyer for me is that I don't have to heat up my entire apartment every time I want to cook something. I live in south Texas and it gets well in the 100s. Using the air fryer helps tremendously to keep my place cool with out the need to constantly use my A/C
Another thing you could do with an air fryer is grab an extension cord and if you have a balcony, cook your stuff outside. No excess heat in the apartment!
Not only that, the air fryer uses significantly less energy for those handful of fries. No clue what you pay in the Freedom Nation but over here in Germany i pay 39 Eurocents, exchange says thats roughly 42 Dollarcents, per kilowatthour. With prices like that every watt counts.
I love your videos so much, brother. I love your vibe and I have learned so much from you. Learning about simple technology and mechanisms is such a good escape from the abundant negativity and despair. You’re making the world a better place for me and many others. We are lucky to have you.
I treat mine as a german appliance and salute it with "Guten Tag, Herr Fryer" . I love my ActiFry, slightly different functioning (with a rotating mixing arm). Thanks for the nice video !
@@BaddDukk Same here, ActiFry just managed to either dry everything way too much or turn it into a mush and cleaning was such a pain. Only thing it was actually good at was roasting nuts and seeds and because I could do few big batches and have enough for months the cleanup wasn't that much issue then but using it daily? Nope. My bad experience with ActiFry was why it took me so long to buy another one until I tried out basket type at my friend's and oh what a difference. Cleanup, convenience and results that cannot be compared with ActiFry.
Pro-tip: air fry outside, right under your heat pump's intake. Then you can pump some of that waste heat back into your house and turn it into house heat! 😃 ...Or just air fry inside and all of the waste heat stays in and warms up your house, I guess, but then you don't get to cook outside...
@@wasd____ I think I'll try this! I almost exclusively use my air fryer outdoors, because it smells up the house with the aroma of whatever is cooking.
We were surprised when our ultra cheap air fryer turned out to be so useful that it almost replaced the main oven. In fact we remain very pleased with it, even after the numbers around the on-off/timer knob wore off, and later the knob itself fell off. It's now almost a year old and looks much older-well made they ain't. But it still gets used several times a day.
My mum ended up in the same situation with an air fryer replacing the oven. In fact, since she lives in a small flat with very little space, the oven just acts like a really weird cupboard at this point lmao
Keep an eye out for Black Friday deals. Mine was 50 bucks a few years ago and there are no numbers to scratch off and dials to wear out. Still looks pretty new.
@@Imperial_Squid I am similar especially with the fact I live in a one person household, I at this point only use the main oven if I am cooking something that physically wont fit in the basket like a pizza or something. That said I pretty much have always recognised the air fryer is similar to an individual sized fan assisted oven, some items you need to tweak it a bit especially for me as I had an ancient second hand regular oven I used for that stuff before. But it did not take me that long to instinctively figure out the adjustments to make on the fan assisted oven instructions on the packet to make it just work first time, and only a little bit longer before I was back to not even really need to look at those at all unless it was something really unusual for me to be cooking. They are really great for conveniently cooking reasonable quantities of food for one or two people at a time which is ideal for a lot of household aka the vast majority of adults that do not have children or who's children have moved on to their independent lives.
Breville Airfryer Pro convection airfryer is the Cadillac and it's wonderful. Our most used kitchen appliance for past five years. Multiple times per day .... Recommended 🎉
I totally agree on using the cheapest least fancy "air fryer" without all the fancy touch buttons and flashy lights. None of those buttons do anything other than change the instant setting of temperature and cooking time which you inevitably have to then change anyway as any cook knows.
I'm rather fond of my air fryer's built-in reminder chime. Set it to "fries" and it'll prompt every five minutes that the fries need shoogling. Stops me from forgetting whilst I'm cooking other things in the background.
@@Flamekebab Quick cooking like under 20 minutes I'm just in the Kitchen anyway watching TikTok on my mobile to pass the time away. I do not need shoogling beeps and loads of buttons to distract me from that. The only other time I use TikTok is when sitting on the bog.
@Drew-Dastardly I was meaning that I'm using the air fryer for one component of the meal but I'm busy cooking other things using other means (usually a hob). I tend to min/max my cooking pretty hard so that I don't get bored!
It's really easy to do. In Davinci Resolve, I can just press the 'add subtitles' button and it'll use pretty decent (better than TH-cam's) voice recognition to process the video and then just add them. It makes editing easier, too, when you can do text searching to find specific lines.
@@bewilderbeestie ...Well _s(peppino taunt noise),_ and here I've been _manually transcribing_ for baked-in subtitles in my dashcam videos this whole time...
I had the exact same reaction when we were thinking to add one to the house - it's just a convection oven! We have a convection oven! So I tried using it... And it's just not the same. It's as you say - it's fast, gets great results fast, and you don't have to faff with a big oven and all its trays, preheating etc.
I own a convection oven, but I have noticed that it doesn't work as well as a simple counter top air fryer. I actually upgraded from an ancient oven specifically to get rid of my air fryer. However, due to the quick pre-heat and dishwasher safe basket I've still just wound up using the air fryer. It's just more efficient and reliable.
Yeah, the food in my air fryer is often done by the time my inbuilt convection oven has even heated up. I barely use my proper oven these days, it's just too slow and I'm usually only cooking for one or two.
@@Armbrust210 the energy used to make an air fryer is orders of magnitude lower than the energy used to produce a standard oven thats only used to heat up a frozen pizza lol thats a hellofa lot more manageable .
The thermal mass of air is so low that a normal-sized pizza entering the oven a single degree warmer or colder would involve several orders of magnitude more energy transfer than warming the ~1 cubic meter of air.
@@jamesharding3459 There heat isn't gonna stay in the air only though, it's gonna go through all the over and escape it, and mos tof it won't even go to the pizza
I would like to think that designing a toaster-oven that can also air-fry is not insurmountable. But testing dozens of toaster-ovens is beyond the scope of this channel.
I have a Breville toaster oven that has a convection mode. When I tried to use it for "air frying" fries it didn't do a very good job but I don't have one of those special baskets. I may get on and try again
I've got a nice Breville toaster oven with digital controls, it has bake, convection and air fryer modes, and I literally never use my full-size oven. It also goes up to 480 F and therefore makes great pizza :) I found a pizza stone that fits it perfectly.
I still have the same toaster oven on my kitchen counter since I moved from my parents house 18 years ago. And I still use it every morning for breakfast. I love things that don't break after 5-10 years.
Excellent video 👍 as a poor college student living in a crappy studio apartment, I love hearing your technical yet practical breakdowns on fads such as these that are very applicable to my everyday life; ie: the swamp cooler video, the recent mini fridge video, the 'too much laundry detergent video', and so many more I can't recall. Your videos are truly a life changer for me, keep it up, friend.
An air fryer and an electric kettle is all you need in a dorm. (usually there are communal microwaves) totally changes the game over banned hotplate and a toaster oven.
This demonstrates the value of certain “unitaskers,” which do just one thing and they do it well. Multitaskers, such as a toaster oven combo, may be a jack of all trades, but definitely as master of maybe one or two, if any. I have one of those toaster oven/air fryer/convection oven combos and on most modes, it does a fairly decent job-however, it really stinks at making toast. Some of these devices actually border on a class of device that Alton Brown termed “doppletaskers”-devices that really suck at what they were designed to do, but excel at tasks that they weren’t designed to do. Blade coffee grinders come to mind-lousy at coffee, but great at grinding spices. I notice these days that even the manufacturers are starting to recognize this by inserting the words “and spice” between the words “coffee” and “grinder.”
Yea. Did my own experiment. Just tried cooking a pieces of frozen chicken in my air fryer basket style that has all the touch buttons for various modes. Set same temp and time, made no difference with what mode i used Air Fry, Bake, Roast, French Fry etc. Always learn something from you! Thanks!
As a human: Mate. I watch every video even if the tech is not interesting to me (which is rare) because I know the *connections* you make to other tech and the dry whit will make it worth a solid watch. As a fellow video editor: I just love how you structure it all. As a fellow obsessive human: I love watching your obsessions morph from one topic to another. And as a fellow TH-camr… I just love it all. Big ups and keep doing you. 😂
I feel the same way. Dishwasher video? Boring. Oh wait, it's by Technology Connections? Add to my watch list. It'll be good. BTW, my wife has a cheap air fryer and she loves it. She puts fries, tots, or other sides in there to cook while she's using the oven and stove for the main dish.
Technology Connections.... Making me interested in things I have no interest in for many years!!!! This guy really earned his success and mastered his art, as I can't let any of his videos pass without watching, whatever the subject! Keep it up!
My Mom worked in big commercial kitchens for years and was already a believer in "convention cooking" and was skeptical like you of these devices. She got one and now loves it!
as someone who has both a convection oven and an air fryer, it's clear both do the same function, but it's also clear the air fryer is much, much faster when dealing with small portions, which is what i use it for.
My air fryer was a game changer. As a single guy I did despise having to preheat my oven to cook a single chicken breast, chicken wings, fries, etc etc. Then the air fryer came into my life, and it became "put it in, hit the preset, walk away" I still get what he's saying, but damn they are handy for single people!
I got tired of my small deep fryer and ordered an air fryer which arrived just today. Waaay better than I expected and the cost of oil is gonna pay for the fryer in no time.
Same! I also use it to toast frozen bagels/buns for breakfast. Really fast and keeping bready things frozen helps prevent me being sad about throwing out moldy breadstuffs. So convenient
Agree 100%. I have been in my house for over 2 years and only used the over 1 time to make some biscuits for Christmas. My airfryer is a larger one with 3 shelves or a rotating basket (great for chips). I use it for everything from cooking chips, pies, chicken etc. it's also a great tool to have when reheating pastry and other food that a microwave turns soggy. Simply heat the food back up in the microwave and stick it in the air fryer for a few minutes to crisp it back up!
Living by myself these air-fryers are great little devices, and it actually has replaced my big oven. Mostly. Even things like bread or the occasional cookie/brownie I will do in the airfryer. Works just fine. Really the only time I turn on my big oven is if I'm having to cook for more than 1 guest, which is rare. Or when I'm cooking big batches of stews or spaghetti sauce to freeze.
Down here in NZ we’d call a fanless oven mode a convective oven and the fan mode ‘fan forced’. You’ll generally find the instructions on packaging specifically note convective and fan-forced with different instructions. Usually a drop in temp by about 20C and smidge shorter cook time. Fan-forced also tends to share the instructions with air fryer.
@@GeneCash that's funny, I'm the opposite and I can't remember the last time I've seen a convection oven. My oven, friends, family, are all standard... Even the more modern flat top ones.
Yeah that makes more sense than calling a fan oven convection. Convection happens WITHOUT a fan, it’s just the way hot air moves in an oven. Really weird to call a fan oven a convection oven.
I understood what an 'Air Fryer' was right from the start, so, I've NOT JUST 'Cooked chips/fries' or chicken and such, but, have used my Air Fryer to cook 'Fray Bentos' tinned pies, heating up pre-cooked pies/pasties and slices, even done some 'Stir fry' meals too! The ONLY thing I've had to do is, make up an activated charcoal filter and mount that on the back exhaust port to cut down smells and such... 😏👍 😎🇬🇧
I think the big difference between a "regular" convection oven and an air fryer is the fact that it combines the heating element for direct radiative heating, (like a toaster oven/overhead grill/broiler) and circulating air (like a convection oven). Compared to the toaster ovens there seems to be also a lot more heating element compared to the surface area: the airfryer element is almost completely above the whole surface, while the toasteroven heating elements are much further away from each other.
@@VideoArchiveGuy in my career as an HVAC/R service engineer and gas/propane technician, my sample set includes mostly commercial and industrial equipment where reversing is not always the case. You can typically tell by the type of blower wheel installed: forward curve or backward inclined, single direction; vertical paddles, bi-directional
I got a Gourmia French door air fryer toaster oven. It does both really well. The fan is off when it's baking, it's also located on the side so it doesn't lose much heat when it's baking and blows directly on the food if you put the basket in the middle row. Best $25 thrift shop find ever
This channel is incredible! I have been thinking about Airfryers vs Convection Ovens for a while now, and this video really helped me decide what to do on the kitchen I’m designing, thanks a lot!
0:30 - THANK YOU for leading with this. This fact is why shopping for a regular toaster oven is annoying today; every manufacturer wants to call theirs an "Air Fryer Toaster Oven" and charge 15% to 40% more for the same box of toasty coils with an added fan. (edited because autocorrect)
Which doesn't even work, because a large part of why air friers get food crispy is because the cooking area is small and the fan is big. Air frying needs really turbulent air flow that you just don't get in any of those toaster ovens with a fan.
I will say the Kitchen Aid Countertop Oven "with air fry", is probably one of the best appliances I've used. Easy to use the menu for mode, time and temp with its single dial, is great. It can toast, bake, air fry, and reheats food extraordinarily well. I will agree at 15:30 , the basket is great, because the oven baskets are such a pain to wash.
This is a good deep dive into air fryers/ovens. I actually own the Midea flexify air oven. So far it has been perfect for both tasks. One thing I like is the convection fan actually does turn fully off in certain modes such as bake, although you can turn it on any time. It sounds like it has a secondary fan responsible for keeping certain electronics cool. With that my baked goods come out perfect and anything air fried is super crispy. Technology...
The bit at the beginning got me curious about my apartment's crappy oven, so I open it up and lo and behold, no fan! No wonder it's so much slower to cook than any other oven I've used. This channel has taught me so much about my kitchen appliances it's a little crazy.
I don't think I've ever had an oven with a fan. But then, given ovens tend to last a while, I don't think I've had one made before the new millennium either.
I think convection ovens became a "thing" after 2000 or so, and probably only the "high end" ones at that point - no typical home gamer ovens had convection before that
Only very high end home ovens have convection fans and even then its rare, thats why oven stove combos are on 220 volt outlets, they heat with pure electrical power and insulation. Most large convection ovens are industrial, the ones you find at home are large toaster oven sized. Your apartments crappy oven is slow because the element is probably half dead and its poorly insulated.
@@chrish931 At least for Germany what you’re saying is wrong. Even my student accommodation has a crappy underpowered convection oven with 5 modes (convection, heat, grill, light, off).
We’ve had our air fryer for a couple years and it just sat on the counter. But about 4 months ago I tried some frozen burritos and wow I really preferred that over the microwave. Then I started using it for other stuff. The grilled cheese sandwiches are to die for that I can whip up. I use it all the time now and it is easy to handle and clean. You can basically cook anything that will fit in it. Great episode.
I have a microwave that doubles as a convection oven, and it features a "roast" mode that turns on both elements at the same time. It rapidly became my favorite way to reheat frozen burritos, as it's only a bit slower than pure microwave, and the burritos don't come out soggy.
You can experiment with pre-microwaving food , then put it in the Air fryer. I've had a lot of luck using both when doing roast potatoes, and heating some frozen foods. It tends to work best with bulkier foods, with thin foods it's a waste of time.
@@lmpeters my microwave's bake mode has not been actually used in ~20years, so turning the mode on just spits out smoke from all the oils accumulated on the element from ~20years of microwaving, lol
same happened with me. mum had a pretty new airfryer when she died, my brother didn't want it so I took it. it sat unused on the counter for two years... then the oven broke. it took almost a week for the real estate agency we rent from to get someone out to fix the oven. I had already meal planned and shopped for a fortnight's worth of food and didn't have the funds to completely change my mostly oven-based plans... so I tried the air fryer and was very impressed. I still prefer the oven for larger volumes of food and for baking, but for smaller things that I want crispy? hell yeah.
I think the idea was that you could spray a light layer of oil or fat onto the food and the air would bring the heat therefore frying with the smallest amount of fat possible instead of deep frying. I think the name air fryer was to differentiate these from deep frying immersion fryers. I've had the simple kind but I love my 2 basket complicated version for being able to do 2 things at once with different settings. Air fryers also excel at reheating fried foods and pizza. I like my refrigerated cold pizza the next morning but to each his own. Frozen pizza can be cooked by the slice well and quickly in an air fryer too! If the basket is big enough you can do a whole bird (especially Cornish Game Hens) and bake refrigerated roll dough or cupcakes/brownies. Thanks for another great video!
@@cheezitz6730 Kinda seems funny, especially having used my Air fryer so much, unless we're doing fries from scratch nothing really needs any oil and it's best directly applied so that little tray would probably be pointless, if not an extra mess not worth the trouble to use
_I think the idea was..._ that consumers are stupid enough to buy a toaster oven for $200 if we tell them that baking is actually frying only healthier. But for $50, they're not bad appliances.
I bought a cheap Princess-brnaded air fryer - has touch controls but they operate in a very logical manner. It's been working flawlessly for 4-5 years and it makes cooking soooo much easier.
I would add to the definition of an airfryer: "Having a basket with a vertical handle, which can be yanked out at any time". IOW: all those toaster ovens etc, with a "air fry" option are just wannabes.
I have one and it sucks absolute balls lol, microwave works great but the air fryer/convection setting is bolted onto the back and is not nearly fast enough to cook things well does still heat up the house less than the regular oven so it's at least a little handy in the summer for small batch stuff at least
@@John-yh5gm I guess it is now! I have a microwave I got many years ago that has a regular heating element coil at the top for baking... I use it to make baked nachos, or to melt cheese on baked pasta dishes without warming up the real oven. Only downside is you have to remember to clean splattered microwaved food off the heating element or else it burns when you do eventually use the element (if used infrequently like I do).
for reasons, i dont own a stove of any kind right now so i use cheap small air fryer as oven replacement for all my food warming needs, and it works very well, i could almost live like this all the time if only it could also boil a pot of water, one drawback is it uses surprisingly lots of kilowatts of energy
7:02 lol I literally have this exact model sitting next to me but it’s whatever revision came before the air frying trend and it’s just labeled “convection” with a little fan symbol instead
18:10 I'm 99% sure the name was picked for marketing reasons, to hone in on their target audience. People with an oven probably don't wanna buy an 'oven' that's that small, especially when they know their big one can do the same job. But saying "it's like frying, but healthier because you're not using oil?" That draws people in.
@@afjer In all fairness my experience of actually trying to fry some chicken nuggets led to the nuggets becoming biscuits on the outside, so I do the same too on those. Rest though, I usually don't.
I remember when they were first develping the Air fryer back in the late ninites and it was all about getting the same tase as deep fried food with far less oil. If I remember correctly, I saw the Dutch engineer who invented the Air Fryer, Fred van der Weij on an Australian science show. At the time the product under development was aimed more at commercial kitchens.
While I do realize it's not actually frying anything, I must admit that everything i put in it comes out far crispier than anything I put in my oven without burning it. I can honestly see why they call it that.
I truly LOVE your content. I am an avid tinkerer and am passionate about learning new things every chance I get. Thank You so much. I also LOVE your bloopers at the end of your videos.
Great Video, I agree Airfryers are just small and fast convection ovens, but that is exactly why I love them. Compared to my big oven it saves a ton of power, is easy to clean and some dishes are just perfect in it.
I disagree. Something that’s already been pointed out in the comments is that a good air fryer must exhaust the air to remove moisture from the food. Convection ovens don’t do this at all, and will not produce the same level of crispiness.
The essence of NEN is seen at 15:22, where the camera's focus point is set to the edge of the table so EVERYTHING looks blurry... And Alec didn't bother to take another shot. Never change
I have a toaster oven with a convection setting that is labeled "Turbo". This video taught me that if it was just a bit newer it would be labeled "air fry" instead.
Even more simply put, it's an electric stovetop burner turned upside down with a fan blowing that heat onto your food. Honestly if someone would have told me how simple of a design it was I wouldn't have waited so long to pay $30 for a device that simplifies my life so dang much.
I bought an air fryer some 18 months ago, and have not regretted it since. I knew it was basically a small convection oven when I bought it, and have treated it as such. The pre-heat time and overall amount of air being heated in my regular oven has always felt kinda.. wasteful to me, so when I saw a decent air fryer on sale I jumped on it, and use it more than my regular oven. Though of course sometimes I need to cook something that doesn't fit in the air fryer and it still gets put in the regular oven, but at least now I don't have to spend 50 minutes cooking fries (my oven takes like 20 minutes to pre-heat)
makes me think, it would be interesting to see the power use stats for, say, baking the same amount of fries in a conventional oven, Vs doing the same amount in an air fryer, would be neat to see what you might save on an electrical bill
I have a Ninja foody that is an air fryer and pressure cooker it's big enough to cook a large chook or leg of lamb, has a 6 litre stainless steel pot with a stainless steel oven rack i use baking paper under the food to keep it clean, after cooking you take the pot and rack out to clean. I stopped using the regular oven and microwave for cooking for me was the best $400 investment
Just a small thing to add: There are two different kinds of convection ovens: The "simpler" type just uses the standard heating elements and a fan. It's usually just marked with a fan symbol or a fan + the lines above and/or below. The other and arguably better type has a heating element right in front of the fan (just like air fryers) and is usually marked with a fan inside of a circle
Our Bosch range lets you switch between both modes. "Convect.Bake" is the standard style. "Convect. Multi-Rack" uses the heating element behind the fan in the back of the oven.
Which mode is better depends always on the meal you want to prepare. You don't want to make roast with any fan mode, as it turns dry on the outside and is still raw on the inside. You should always use the heating elements below and above the meal and preheat the oven. When roasting small stuff, such as vegetables, my experience is that the fan with the heating elements in the oven creates the best result and speeds up the baking process but you should preheat. For anything which just needs to get hot using the heating elements before the fan is best, as it distributes the heat most evenly and is by far the fastest to heat the oven up, it takes like 5-10 Minutes before the heating element gets turned off. You don't even need to preheat as the outside of the food isn't burned by the radiant heat of the heating elements before it gets warm enough in the oven. I much prefer old ovens because they usually have an tiny vent which exhausts air and therefore moisture out of the oven. Which is useful for baking muffins, for example. They get crispy on the outside, as they should be in my opinion. No need to put something in the oven door to let it stay partly open, which is truly horrendous for energy consumption. The best option of course would be to be able to open or close the vent to save energy when it isn't needed; but that is an feature I've never seen. Most people don't think about which mode is best to use when and then lament about their roast beeing dried up, their oven taking forever or heating irregulary or their food beeing soggy, because their oven circulates moisture-saturated air around. The funniest is when they use the steam-bake function for things you should absolutely not use it for (greetings to my aunt and the soggiest croquettes on the planet). Giving them an additional feature will just make them even more overwhelmed.
Welcome to no effort November. My teleprompter hates me and doesn't even work right. This is an airfryer, but it actually is a convection oven, just a more portable one. THE END. See, I can use less effort than him. LOL
12:54 I prefer toasting toast with toaster ovens over regular toasters for two main reasons: 1. You can fit more in it than just two slices of bread 2. You can look inside and judge how toasty the bread is without having to experiment and find the right knob setting
You can fit more in, but every slice is patterned differently and toasting in pairs in a regular toaster is not a chore unless youre making ten+ slices
I love how buttered bread turns out when you put it in the air frier. Then you get a crispy side with a slightly buttery flavor. With a type of bread like a bagel or ciabatta that has crust on the other side, you can stop there, but with sliced bread you have a less crispy side that you can put your choice of spread (peanut butter for me) on
I don't have a convection oven due to small apartment, but only a fanless Rommelsbacher Kitchenmaster 3001, so I do appreciate those little airfryers. Just like I appreciate this video
well just because he put the blooper reel in doesn't mean there was effort put into it. he didn't put the nice square cutout on the right side like usual!
It's a convection oven in the same way that one of those Formula1 cars are go carts. To an extent they work on similar principles, but you're not going to get adequate results swapping them.
We've had an "Air Fryer" for some time now. And I was quite impressed with its performance. I also have a "toaster oven" for standard bake/grill/convection cooking. I noticed a number of differences, my basket has a wire mesh base which sits inside the bucket. The bucket is heavily contoured to churn the air. But what I have noticed is that the speed of air frying is about 30-50% faster than convection oven cooking. I think that is most attributed to the fact that cooking occurs on all sides simultaneously. I'm also from "down under", so we push out c. 240 volts, so that probably helps too. If I did frozen chips for any more than 10 minutes, they would be incinerated rather than crispy. So, 1 vote from me!✅
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One extra thing, the dedicated air fryers exhaust a lot of air while a convection oven recirculates the same air. This makes the air fryer dryer and crispier.
Ooohh, good point, though how precisely the intake cooling air mixes with the "hotbox" air seems hard to work out without a lot of modelling I definitely will not be doing.
@@TechnologyConnectionsI have an instant pot with an air frying/grilling option, and the amount of air expelled seems to be significantly less than the power of the fan. I think the main difference other than the air expulsion, is the speed at which the air is being blown around inside it (which I'm sure when I've finished watching the video I'll find you mentioned :) )
And use more energy.
Air fryer owners who keep replying the same thing over and over, I don't care if it's just a tiny bit more energy, go eat your fries and chicken nuggets.
Still, a convection oven does have an exhaust up top to get rid of some moisture.
I use the convection/grill-mode that uses the grill heater at the top of the oven, gives my fries that crispy feel and reduces the time needed at the same time.
@mister_milkman wow good observation Einstein. Who cares? It's probably pennies a month extra.
I'm sure somebody said this the other week but I'll say it too: I always enjoy a video where Alec discusses a box that changes the temperature, and sometimes other key attributes, of its contents.
All the box does is change the temperature. The physics-ual properties of its contents are what determine what else happens.
Man, it really is amazing how much intricacy there is in "Box that changes temperature" in the human ecosystem. Enough Alec practically runs his channel on those alone!
Is this comment a euphemism?
@@KingTaltia Per the second law of thermodynamics, every box which does any work is a box that changes temperature!
Reminds me of a Ryan George video: I've got a box that makes food cold and another one to make food hot!
Thank you for continuing to put in enough effort to turn your script into subtitles. Not many channels caption their videos well and It's very appreciated.
Google's auto titling is utterly awful except for when it's amusingly inaccurate. I even found one occurrence where it had turned youtube-friendly speech into bad language.
honestly a waste of effort writing a good script to _not_ caption it
this, so this.
i have like 5 small-ish channels that i love that put in the effort of proper captions when giant chanels just dont which is sad cuz captions are an amazing accecabuility tool and you just know that big channel has the resources to properly caption every vid but they just dont
I always run my video through something Whisper-based to make subtitles. It takes 5 mins max and is so much better than the TH-cam autocaptions!
@@albertbozesan look up the article "Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said" it's very damning towards the accuracy of whisper
Please never stop. It is nice to get a peek into how these machines work when I want to be an informed buyer, as well as feeding the curious cat in me. Thank you.
An air fryer is the perfect no-preheat oven for bachelor portions. I use mine all the time. Don't try degreasing the drawer with hot water and drain cleaner though - 'cos all the non stick coating comes unstuck and you end up with a shiny metal drawer instead.
Ever since I started using air fryer liners, I've never gone back. There's a few drawbacks depending on which ones you get but as long as you always use them the basket will stay pretty clean. Best bet is to use one without holes below the false floor, and one with holes above it.
@@SonicKiwi123I just don't clean mine often...
They're great for reheating previously-fried items. Egg rolls and french fries are fine.
Real talk, though: toaster ovens do 85% of the same job. They're also GREAT for reheating a slice or two of pizza.
@@SonicKiwi123 that's a lot of work for a device made for convenience. I throw the basket and the tray in the dishwasher.
Even though I'm familiar with the old meme, the "of-in of-out" bit still made me think I was having a stroke
I only ever heard it from one group of streamers I watch, so hearing it here threw me, too.
Fargield
I'm just shocked he included it lmao
This is the most shockingly comprehensible delivery of this joke I think I've ever heard.
I audibly giggled when I heard of in the cold
Air fryers are SO convenient for me as a disabled person. It’s faster, I don’t have to bend down to reach an oven, I’m less likely to burn myself, and when you drop baskets they tend to keep the food inside! Plus our oven is super basic.
Yes!!!! Also it doesn't heat up the house as much in my experience- that's very important because my heat tolerance sucks and I live in TX
My dad had significant mobility issues, and while I'm sad he isn't around to enjoy their conveniences, I feel joy knowing you get to. Inclusiveness rules.
Ohh, I never considered that before! That's a great point. Thank you!
Same here! I have arthritis in my spine & hands & using the oven is quite difficult for me. Small, countertop appliances like the air fryer are so helpful.
it when microwave, first came out and promo's, bleb, that they could cook anything, in excepted practise onlt ever warmed cold coffee, and defrosted frozen food, and conventual oven still ended up doing everything else, My has taken over all cooking duties, except pizzas, and that mainly and thing where its size problem?
We bought an airfryer for multiple reasons. The most important ones are speed and cost of running.
We have a full on stove oven that pulls 5kW and has to be on for 20 min before actually being warm. Then add whatever you wanted to ... 'oven' and youre at 25 maybe 30 minutes total. 2/3's of the time is just heating the oven (and kitchen... especially in summer...). Also we pay around 40-45 cents / kWh so that adds up REALLY fast.
The airfryer is warm in 2 minutes and pulls just 1100W. I can throw some bake-off rolls in there and they will literally be done in 8 min. It takes less than 1/3 of the time of the oven while pulling almost 1/5th of the energy (also considering that once the airfryer is warm the heating element turns off).
You can get some of your preheating energy back by turning off (or fan only setting) five or ten minutes before the end of cooking time
Energy prices are horrendous in Germany as well, but my preferred energy efficient way of heating stuff is the microwave. 😅
I have both airfryer and microwave. Never bake, so I don't need oven atm
@@dreddwailing5505I agree and do that from time to time but be careful guys... I've gotten myself into situations where I forgot that the food is still in the oven at a very high temperature, even if the oven is turned off... Needless to say: burnt food.
Where do you live that energy’s that expensive?!? In California it’s .32c and that’s already 3x the national average
1:34 was not expecing a "why do they call it oven when you of in the cold food of out hot eat the food" reference
I wasn’t, either, and yet, I absolutely should have been.
Whom amongst us could forget the “Dietz nuts”?
That is generally how jokes work
@@nowionlywantatriumph There was (is?) an actual product called Dietz Nuts. It was bite-size pieces of cured meat lmao, all I really remember is I really really really didn't like one of the spices they used in it.
I've never heard that joke/reference and it felt like I was having a stroke listening to that part.
A certified internet classic. Put it in the museum, boys., so we can preserve it for future generations.
Bloopers on a No-effort November video?! This feels like it required effort...
pretty sure that it doesn't take any effort to mess up your script.
I mean he also wrote a script and set up an autocue
Not if your goal is a TH-cam video. Bloopers are free watch time really
Those aren't bloopers, they are references to the "why do they call it oven" Garfield comic image.
The thing about getting good at something is that it requires less and less 'effort' to do well the better you get. This is the most obvious when you look at competitive pvp gaming, often people who do very well get called 'sweats' because it is presumed that those people sweat their asses off working super hard to execute complicated advanced strategies and complicated movement patterns. But the reality is that those players play like that completely effortlessly due to practice and experience. The same kind of thing is going on here, he's been making videos so long hes got so much experience with the process that it would be more effort to cut more of the corners on it than it would be to simply go with whatever the regular process is for the most part.
16:40 I believe there's a special place in hell reserved for the person that started the trend of putting objectively terrible touch controls into every appliance.
It's a cost saving feature. Touch buttons are cheaper and more robust than normal buttons. I hate it too.
yes. it's called the meijer's demo aisle
I hope you are right! I particularly despise touch pad interfaces in rooms where my hands might be wet or greasy. Like in the kitchen or bathroom. Yuck!
Very fun with our washing machine and dryer, both appliances where the touch controls won't work with cold or damp hands. Which practically will never happen when handling wet laundry ...
I like touch buttons in the kitchen. It's a lot easier to clean a flat surface.
I did not expect this video to be positive on Air Fryers but you are one of the few people I trust to actually closely look at the pros and cons of such devices ^^
I own a smaller full oven and it does "air frying" better than any full sized- or Toaster- oven I've used
I used to be in the "it's just a convection oven" camp - obviously it's literally true mechanically, but the specific parameters of amount of air movement relative to cooking cavity size are important. It's like saying "A shovel is just a wide pickaxe" - literally true, they both impact and scoop and are made of a metal head and wood handle, but that width parameter is transformative.
Are they due now have the toaster oven variety which can convection bake as well as air fry ad all the normal toaster oven functions. Like most toaster ovens you can even do conventional baking without the fan..
It is not literally true mechanically. Because the air frier's mechanism is built so that it imports air from the outside, and dumps out the hot & damp air that has taken up moisture.
But yes, the exact amount of airflow and overall aerodynamics do matter too. Like when he had a drip-tray under the basket blocking the air-flow from the fan below it.
Also probably other factors matter too (maybe how much radiative heat is transferred from black-body radiation, and such?).
@@feha92 I like the term "imports air." I understand it may be technically correct, but I can imagine a Storybots episode where something inside of the air fryer is putting in a parcel request for some fresh imported air.
Calling an air fryer a convection oven is like calling a tornado "a light breeze".
@@feha92 that's a couple fair points. If we made a category of devices that are"box that gets hot", a regular toaster is one where radiant heat dominates, heat is very high, air movement is next to none. A conventional oven, only natural convection, convection is the dominant heating method unless you're on the top rack on broil (radiant heat definitely matters there). A convection oven, some forced air movement, it's enough to stir the chamber up significantly more, but it's a dinky fan and a big chamber, only slightly different than conventional oven. Air fryer, the thing sounds like a jet engine with its powerful fan for such a tiny chamber, it blasts with dry air from the outside.
You could put all this in a weird 3D space, with the axes being chamber size, air flow rate, exchange rate with outside air.
I didn't think much of them. But I kept hearing how much people loved theirs so I bought one. One of the best appliance purchases I've ever made. I use it way more than the oven or toaster oven. Crazy handy. Sometimes... and I don't believe I'm admitting this... when everyone says something is great... it actually is!
Same here. Was expecting this to be another "hot pot" or whatever the fad before it was. In reality, I've just relegated my full-size oven to an appliance I only use to make Thanksgiving turkey.
They're still a fad though - everyone was talking about them a year or 2 ago, and now you hardly hear anyone mention them
@@gorak9000 I don't know who you hang out with but the fact he made a video about it kind of contradicts your point.
@@gorak9000 I just got one, mainly because people who bought them a few year ago are still using theirs and find them really useful. So it is still a thing.
I've actually lost weight cooking my bacon and other such fatty-cooked food in these instead of a frying pan!
Dad wasn't convinced either but he bought a semi-broken one (the timer is wonky). Needless to say we have another two waiting in the cupboard for this one to die over a year later XD
Crispyness: one thing worth noting that may explain why air fryers became popular despite convection ovens existing for so long, is how you actually make that desirable "crispy/crunchy tasty texture".
It's not just HEAT. It's a combo of heat and moisture. In order to get the desirable malaird reaction, you need to get it up to a pretty high temperature (up to 330F) which is well above boiling. But if there is any moisture in your food, the water will actually prevent the internal food temperature from going above boiling. The more heat energy you put in, the water will "steal" from the food and use it to evaporate.
So in order to effectively crisp your food you need to dry it out/remove moisture. In reality it's a combo of dry it out, and provide high heat at the same time. This is the real challenge.
As mentioned in the video, air is a poor conductor of thermal energy. There just aren't a lot of air molecules to bump into your food to give it heat. Which is why hot cooking oil works great in a traditional deep fryer. It surrounds the food with lots of hot molecules to bump into (and transfer heat). Plus since steam floats in oil, when the moisture evaporates out of the food as steam, it bubbles up to the surface and leaves. This creates convection currents in the oil, meaning the hot oil is circulating so your food is always bathed in a fresh supply of super hot oil.
So to get air working as close to oil as possible, you don't just need a fresh supply of super heated air, you also need a way to quickly remove that moisture. The best air fryers have very intentionally designed internals to get the optimal air circulation patterns that provide fresh, hot air evenely over the food surface AND to carry away moisture and remove it from the air.
Which explains why not all devices are created equal. HEAT + FAN is not enough to result in a good cooking experience.
(As I've personally found, smaller units tend to perform better, as smaller areas are easier to maintain high heat and are more forgiving with airflow currents).
But 330°F is only 166°C, so, well within the temperature range of ovens, including air fryers.
@@rosiefay7283 yes, but ovens are much larger, so they take a lot longer to heat up even with there larger plug
@@rosiefay7283 Great point! this is where the more close up view of the chemistry that is happening comes in handy. The basic idea is the temperature inside the oven isn't uniform. It might be 330F at the element, or 330F at the thermostat, but it could (and usually has to be) lower near the food.
Plus, and this is the tricky part. If there is any moisture in the food, it will stay at 220F and won't go any higher, until the moisture has evaporated. This evaporation actually takes a relatively large amount of energy, so just evaporating the water will take a LOT of heat away from that 330F air. The higher the air temp the faster it will evaporate, and you need to evaporate before you can get the delicious crisp/browning.
Also note, that if you evaporate too slow, (ie at too low a temp) then what you end up doing is drying out the food and not browning it. So it gets crunchy, but in a dessicated dried out jerky sort of way, and less that delicious crisp. (And for a french fry you want crispy on the outside and moist in the middle. If the whole thing is dried through then it'll just be a dried potato, which is way less appetizing).
So the magic of an air fryer (why they call it "frying" at all) is that it tries to mimic what happens in a deep fryer. Convection currents of hot oil swirling around your food, heating it up and carrying away steam/moisture. But since there is no oil they have to do it with air. And air is way more diffcult/less forgiving so it's necessarily not going to work as well. (And be much more challenging to do it right).
As a side note: look at any guide to tell you when your meat/fish/food is done, and see what internal temp you are looking for. (Eg. 150F, 160F, 170F etc). You'll notice none of them are that hot (they are all, well under boiling), even though your oven or gill might be set to 450F or higher. The temperature you cook at is NOT the same temperature your food is at. Which is the entire challenge of cooking. How to transfer enough heat into your food, to get it to the desired temperature, at the desired pace, to make it taste good. It's why sous veide cooking is also an interesting work around to this.
From a cook perspective, if you are doing baking, like bread, cookies or a cake, baking in an oven by convection ovens works better.
If you are doing convection baking for fish, chicken, fries or veggies, an air fryer works better, weirdly.
Why? Smaller space, more air intake, and a stronger heating element cranked to max with air moving over it does 2 main things. First, heating the food from overhead, providing direct heat. But second, it works as a heat pump, moving the hot air out, and with it, the humid air from removing moisture from the food.
So, that makes it also...a crappy too high temp dehydrator!
That...actually is why it works super well? Weirdly?
As for why air fryers are actually good to a cook, and why most of us who work in the industry encourage em?
Good for cooking for 2 people, like a small piece of salmon on a night off, and it reheats leftover fries from the local diner perfectly.
Reheated fries in a home appliance? Worth the money, period.
The smaller space is also easier to manage the temperature in. A normal oven pretty much has to make a guess about what temperature the food is at since all its sensors are on the exterior of the massive box full of air, but if there is less space in that box then it has a better shot at holding the temperature at where it needs to be at.
lol how does "No effort November" turn into the angriest of your videos I've seen so far? I love it.
Logical conclusion: not being salty requires effort
Sometimes rethinking an existing thing is just as good as creating a new thing.
Yes! One thing that has always bothered me with conventional ovens is that they're designed to be the size of a car trunk. You can bake a not-so-small child in there.
It may be good to have the option to do that once a year, but for my everyday cooking I bake like... 300 grams of food. 1 kilogram, tops. It's a brick sized portion usually.
@TheWinjin Um, do you know that from experience?...
@@TheWinjinI have questions and I’m not sure I want to know the answers
Please! Do bread machines!
Yes!! And make sure it's a zojirushi because otherwise why even bother!
@@strayiggytv he could compare different models
I dont get the appeal of a device which can only really make one shape of bread. Sure you can put in different mixtures to make different breads, but learning to bake is worthwhile and you get better results.
@@strayiggytv My $45 Breadmaker consists of a bucket, a heating element and a turning thingy to knead the dough, from what I've seen the more expensive breadmakers don't really add anything. I mean sure everything is a bit nicer, but I suspect it's like with air fryers, and spending more doesn't really get you a whole lot more. After all the cheapest breadmaker I could find on amazon at the time bakes really good bread, rivaling what I can get from bakeries in my area (depending on my recipe ofc)
@@arnoldkotlyarevsky383 baking is awesome but most people buy a regular loaf of bread like once a week and being able to just throw some flower, water, salt, and sugar in a machine and have it produce that loaf of bread every week but taste better for a cheaper price appeals a lot to me. I don't have a bread machine thats just my 2 cents
0:18: The teleprompter heard you saying No Effort November.
That one had me giggling for a good minute, what a start to the month
I know I didnt edit the right way... but ok, november. Epic.
"Aight no effort it is!"
thanks. deja vu.
"WE'LL DO IT LIVE!"
So to put it simple. They are just better convection ovens. I use one of the mid range ones that has a few extra settings and a double basket. It’s great for cooking things especially when you don’t want the oven heating up the house on a hot day. It also tends to cook a little faster and more evenly compared to a traditional oven.
8:32 "...with minimal effort." I thought this was No Effort November, not Minimal Effort March!
Now you've done it, the next video isn't even going to have any cuts!
@@Keyan9 next video won't happen at all with no effort
Typing March is way more effort than typing May!
@@adamcetinkent Maximum Effort March and Minimal Effort May?
The next video is just going to be Alec boiling water in his underwear now. I hope you're happy!
As an one person household, an air fryer has been a really great tool! Effective and efficient at cooking small portions. Just make sure to pick a model that is easy to clean!!! Not just the basket, but also the oven NEEDS CLEANING.
Mine just has racks, which makes it easier to clean.
ngl this was the biggest selling point for me getting one. Its waaay easy to clean and its perfect for making small meals for one person
Had mine for like 5 years and never cleaned. It's like cast iron, adds to the flavor
I have a Philips, it's kinda hard to clean. So I picked up a 2nd one from a thrift store that looked almost new, as if it was only used maybe once. Let's see if this one is better, although I forgot which brand it is.
I just use aluminum foil under most of my frozen food unless I want it extra crisp. It prevent any grease from reaching the container, and after you finish heating, you can just plop it out. It reduce the washing frequency to about once a month since it no longer smell
No effort November genuinely is the best month of TH-cam, your attitude and wit make it pure gold.
I know I’ve been waiting eagerly for November lol
Is this every year or started this year? I seem to have only heard of it this year.
@@Roadent1241 every year as long as i've been watching!
@RoseArkana Well somehow I've completely missed it and I've been watching YT for as long as it's been out.
I know of no nuts November so I understood that was the only thing.
0:12 The teleprompter: “Oh I’m sorry, it be No Effort November for just you, only you! never get a stupid break from this guy…”
I also like how the handle and basket design makes it super easy to toss the food halfway through the cooking to get even cooking all around
I've honestly never seen one with a handle. All the ones I have seen resemble little ovens, not toaster ovens or air purifiers.
When you said “toss the food” I wasn’t picturing it being flipped over.
Just a charred nugget flung into the bin
@@jul1440 Skip em. They're trying to be too many things at once. I got a bucket and my mother got a more expensive Toaster Oven +, mine is quicker crispier and easier to clean.
@@Leffrey That happens too. There's a learning curve in the first few weeks....
@@mzaite Mine does not toast, just air fry and rotisserie, but it does do both excellently. The front door comes off completely for easy cleaning. I think it is called Instant Vortex or something like that.
"No effort" and still delivers one of the best technical contents around with grace, wit and lovely puns. :D This is why I love this channel.
Ive been largely critical over air fryers as well. But. As someone who doesnt have a convection oven and hates heating up the whole oven in the summer. Maybe i should consider one. Pleasantly suprised to hear your conclusion as well!
Honestly, it's the #1 used small appliance in our house. Very handy.
I love mine! It’s like a microwave that makes better food
I was very critical over them as well. I recently got one (cosori), and I am totally converted.
Our has become as used as our toaster. It has joined the ranks of toaster and coffee maker by getting to stay on the counter at all times.
i was also a bit sceptical of them until i got one, then i started going from "well this is fine actually" to "oh this is neat" and now i genuinely think it's something most regular people should have.
It's like how you can definitely make coffee without a drip brewer, but they're just so monstrously convenient and cheap enough that the only things that should really put you off having one is: knowing that you'd never really use it (yeah right), or simply not having the space for one (they are annoyingly big).
I literally bought this same cheap air fryer a few weeks ago. The timing for frozen fries and chicken nuggets makes it worth it.
Air speed is definitely relevant. I worked in a cooled meat product factory for years i. Production and R&D. There is a convection oven, and there is an impingement oven. Convection moves some of that cold air, impingement ovens pretty well obliterate it. We used that and live steam to get the intended looks texture and cook as efficiently as we could as quickly as we could, retaining as much weight as we could. 1% of a million lbs of product is pretty important.
I love how you can find literally all sorts of people on TH-cam. Thanks for the cool comment!
I am so glad someone else mentioned impingement! I cleaned ovens for a national pizza chain. Impingement ovens are awesome. We could cook an entire large pizza in 6 minutes from raw. All that's used is hot air. We also cooked all sorts of things. Raw chicken spread out on a tray cooked in about 8 minutes. With my first air fryer I instantly saw the same tech, just not as direct.
@@chemmerling yeah, millions of pounds of product at the place I worked. Various sausage, beef crumbles, meatballs mostly and mostly to go to pizza chains you've heard of. It's fine to work with giant equipment and see the cure little 10 hp grinder at a butcher shop that's similar to the small one I used in the R&D lab.
@@Bradimus1 ok so whenever a professional leaves a comment like yours on a video I end up falling down a rabbit hole because I start googling and ...
so now I am wondering if a spiral oven is a type of impingement oven or not. I can hardly cook and here I am unable to let this go haha
It seems like it is because the one I am looking at blasts the food with hot air along its journey.
@bsadewitz there are lots of types of industrial cooking methods. Most impingement ovens I've seen are a tunnel, not a spiral. It not the path the food takes that makes it an impingement ovens, it's the fast, high volume of hot air being directed at the food that's completely removing the boundary layer of cold air.
I'd liken it to 1.5 gallons per minute from a kitchen faucet, vs 1.5 gallons per minute from a 1200 psi pressure washer. It just going to be able to bring the temp of the food up much faster and brown much better.
“Room where it happened” with the HAMILTON-Beach toaster oven. Bravo…
I was like “people use that expression, it’s probably not a reference to the song” but your comment convinced me that it almost definitely is.
@@Adam_42_01 It's Alec. I don't know if you remember latent image of vaporization, but I do. He pulls stuff like this.
Well spotted, I only caught the Hamilton (Musical) reference buy failed to notice the toaster oven was also Hamilton.
🎵Casio-keyboard-trumpet jazz🎵
I had a "no way he did that" moment 😂
The biggest selling point for an air fyer for me is that I don't have to heat up my entire apartment every time I want to cook something. I live in south Texas and it gets well in the 100s. Using the air fryer helps tremendously to keep my place cool with out the need to constantly use my A/C
I'm also in Texas and came here to say this. Useing an oven while my window unit strains to keep the house cool as is is a fools errand.
I knew there was some way to link this to heat pumps
Another thing you could do with an air fryer is grab an extension cord and if you have a balcony, cook your stuff outside. No excess heat in the apartment!
Not only that, the air fryer uses significantly less energy for those handful of fries. No clue what you pay in the Freedom Nation but over here in Germany i pay 39 Eurocents, exchange says thats roughly 42 Dollarcents, per kilowatthour. With prices like that every watt counts.
Another plus: you can bring corded cooking appliances outside so they don't heat up your house at all. Also grilling.
I love your videos so much, brother. I love your vibe and I have learned so much from you. Learning about simple technology and mechanisms is such a good escape from the abundant negativity and despair. You’re making the world a better place for me and many others. We are lucky to have you.
I treat mine as a german appliance and salute it with "Guten Tag, Herr Fryer" . I love my ActiFry, slightly different functioning (with a rotating mixing arm). Thanks for the nice video !
Wow never saw one with a stir function. Ja then I guess he isn't german but austrian and from steyr.
@@Jakuzziful 😄👍🏻
Interesting. We hated our ActiFry as it never seemed to do a good job, but quite like our Ninja dual basket air fryer.
Same for my bmw and sennheiser headphones
@@BaddDukk Same here, ActiFry just managed to either dry everything way too much or turn it into a mush and cleaning was such a pain. Only thing it was actually good at was roasting nuts and seeds and because I could do few big batches and have enough for months the cleanup wasn't that much issue then but using it daily? Nope. My bad experience with ActiFry was why it took me so long to buy another one until I tried out basket type at my friend's and oh what a difference. Cleanup, convenience and results that cannot be compared with ActiFry.
Heck yes. I was wondering how my air fryer might affect my heat pump efficiency. Now, I'll bet imma find out ...
Pro-tip: air fry outside, right under your heat pump's intake. Then you can pump some of that waste heat back into your house and turn it into house heat! 😃
...Or just air fry inside and all of the waste heat stays in and warms up your house, I guess, but then you don't get to cook outside...
I haven't had to turn on my heat yet because my GPU makes my room nice and toasty before bed. Maybe an air frier can do the same for my living room!
@@wasd____ I think I'll try this! I almost exclusively use my air fryer outdoors, because it smells up the house with the aroma of whatever is cooking.
@@SentientTeapot2444might as well just get an electric heater. Cause it's gonna be the exact same efficiency
Well gee golly wiz. Let me tell you that no air fryer is complete without taking advantage of the latent heat of vaporisation.
We were surprised when our ultra cheap air fryer turned out to be so useful that it almost replaced the main oven. In fact we remain very pleased with it, even after the numbers around the on-off/timer knob wore off, and later the knob itself fell off. It's now almost a year old and looks much older-well made they ain't. But it still gets used several times a day.
OMG yes. the numbers come off so fast and easily. Design overlook
My mum ended up in the same situation with an air fryer replacing the oven. In fact, since she lives in a small flat with very little space, the oven just acts like a really weird cupboard at this point lmao
Keep an eye out for Black Friday deals. Mine was 50 bucks a few years ago and there are no numbers to scratch off and dials to wear out. Still looks pretty new.
@@Imperial_Squid I am similar especially with the fact I live in a one person household, I at this point only use the main oven if I am cooking something that physically wont fit in the basket like a pizza or something. That said I pretty much have always recognised the air fryer is similar to an individual sized fan assisted oven, some items you need to tweak it a bit especially for me as I had an ancient second hand regular oven I used for that stuff before. But it did not take me that long to instinctively figure out the adjustments to make on the fan assisted oven instructions on the packet to make it just work first time, and only a little bit longer before I was back to not even really need to look at those at all unless it was something really unusual for me to be cooking. They are really great for conveniently cooking reasonable quantities of food for one or two people at a time which is ideal for a lot of household aka the vast majority of adults that do not have children or who's children have moved on to their independent lives.
@@stevef4010 Not a "design overlook", it's just cheaper, they know perfectly well it's going to come off, but *you* don't until you buy it and it does
Breville Airfryer Pro convection airfryer is the Cadillac and it's wonderful. Our most used kitchen appliance for past five years. Multiple times per day .... Recommended 🎉
I totally agree on using the cheapest least fancy "air fryer" without all the fancy touch buttons and flashy lights. None of those buttons do anything other than change the instant setting of temperature and cooking time which you inevitably have to then change anyway as any cook knows.
Agreed, though the best middle ground for me is one with knob controls and screen to show its temp and time
I'm rather fond of my air fryer's built-in reminder chime. Set it to "fries" and it'll prompt every five minutes that the fries need shoogling. Stops me from forgetting whilst I'm cooking other things in the background.
@@Flamekebab Quick cooking like under 20 minutes I'm just in the Kitchen anyway watching TikTok on my mobile to pass the time away. I do not need shoogling beeps and loads of buttons to distract me from that. The only other time I use TikTok is when sitting on the bog.
@Drew-Dastardly I was meaning that I'm using the air fryer for one component of the meal but I'm busy cooking other things using other means (usually a hob). I tend to min/max my cooking pretty hard so that I don't get bored!
thank you so much for always including captions, even on the no effort videos. it's such a big help. 💜
It's really easy to do. In Davinci Resolve, I can just press the 'add subtitles' button and it'll use pretty decent (better than TH-cam's) voice recognition to process the video and then just add them. It makes editing easier, too, when you can do text searching to find specific lines.
@@bewilderbeestie ...Well _s(peppino taunt noise),_ and here I've been _manually transcribing_ for baked-in subtitles in my dashcam videos this whole time...
@@bewilderbeestie or if you have a script, you can just adapt the script
@@ThylineTheGay I'm not organised enough to have a script!
I had the exact same reaction when we were thinking to add one to the house - it's just a convection oven! We have a convection oven! So I tried using it... And it's just not the same. It's as you say - it's fast, gets great results fast, and you don't have to faff with a big oven and all its trays, preheating etc.
I own a convection oven, but I have noticed that it doesn't work as well as a simple counter top air fryer. I actually upgraded from an ancient oven specifically to get rid of my air fryer. However, due to the quick pre-heat and dishwasher safe basket I've still just wound up using the air fryer. It's just more efficient and reliable.
Yeah, the food in my air fryer is often done by the time my inbuilt convection oven has even heated up. I barely use my proper oven these days, it's just too slow and I'm usually only cooking for one or two.
Here in Brazil Air Fryers are used so much because convection ovens are not common. So when Air Fryers were launched here it was/is a blast.
I like that you can buy small ovens now because it’s a huge waste of energy to heat a huge volume of air for my frozen pizza
Absolutely.
I feel the same, but you do really have to use it lots to make up for the energy it's production ate up
@@Armbrust210 the energy used to make an air fryer is orders of magnitude lower than the energy used to produce a standard oven thats only used to heat up a frozen pizza lol thats a hellofa lot more manageable .
The thermal mass of air is so low that a normal-sized pizza entering the oven a single degree warmer or colder would involve several orders of magnitude more energy transfer than warming the ~1 cubic meter of air.
@@jamesharding3459 There heat isn't gonna stay in the air only though, it's gonna go through all the over and escape it, and mos tof it won't even go to the pizza
I would like to think that designing a toaster-oven that can also air-fry is not insurmountable. But testing dozens of toaster-ovens is beyond the scope of this channel.
Indeed, especially during No Effort November.
I have a (Cuisinart?) toaster oven that has a convection oven fan.
It works good to bake chicken faster than standard
We should suggest it to Project Farm then
I have a Breville toaster oven that has a convection mode. When I tried to use it for "air frying" fries it didn't do a very good job but I don't have one of those special baskets. I may get on and try again
@Sb129, that is a great idea and I bet that he would do a bang-up job of it. Now I'm curious about what kind of tests and metrics he would devise.
I've got a nice Breville toaster oven with digital controls, it has bake, convection and air fryer modes, and I literally never use my full-size oven. It also goes up to 480 F and therefore makes great pizza :) I found a pizza stone that fits it perfectly.
I still have the same toaster oven on my kitchen counter since I moved from my parents house 18 years ago. And I still use it every morning for breakfast. I love things that don't break after 5-10 years.
Excellent video 👍 as a poor college student living in a crappy studio apartment, I love hearing your technical yet practical breakdowns on fads such as these that are very applicable to my everyday life; ie: the swamp cooler video, the recent mini fridge video, the 'too much laundry detergent video', and so many more I can't recall. Your videos are truly a life changer for me, keep it up, friend.
An air fryer and an electric kettle is all you need in a dorm. (usually there are communal microwaves) totally changes the game over banned hotplate and a toaster oven.
@@mzaite amen brother, the hotplate ban makes my life sooo much harder, thank God for air fryers
This demonstrates the value of certain “unitaskers,” which do just one thing and they do it well. Multitaskers, such as a toaster oven combo, may be a jack of all trades, but definitely as master of maybe one or two, if any. I have one of those toaster oven/air fryer/convection oven combos and on most modes, it does a fairly decent job-however, it really stinks at making toast. Some of these devices actually border on a class of device that Alton Brown termed “doppletaskers”-devices that really suck at what they were designed to do, but excel at tasks that they weren’t designed to do. Blade coffee grinders come to mind-lousy at coffee, but great at grinding spices. I notice these days that even the manufacturers are starting to recognize this by inserting the words “and spice” between the words “coffee” and “grinder.”
Yea. Did my own experiment. Just tried cooking a pieces of frozen chicken in my air fryer basket style that has all the touch buttons for various modes. Set same temp and time, made no difference with what mode i used Air Fry, Bake, Roast, French Fry etc. Always learn something from you! Thanks!
As a human:
Mate. I watch every video even if the tech is not interesting to me (which is rare) because I know the *connections* you make to other tech and the dry whit will make it worth a solid watch.
As a fellow video editor: I just love how you structure it all.
As a fellow obsessive human: I love watching your obsessions morph from one topic to another.
And as a fellow TH-camr…
I just love it all.
Big ups and keep doing you.
😂
I feel the same way. Dishwasher video? Boring. Oh wait, it's by Technology Connections? Add to my watch list. It'll be good.
BTW, my wife has a cheap air fryer and she loves it. She puts fries, tots, or other sides in there to cook while she's using the oven and stove for the main dish.
@@michami135that dishwasher video has been used to explain stuff to people so many times. LOVED it.
Technology Connections.... Making me interested in things I have no interest in for many years!!!! This guy really earned his success and mastered his art, as I can't let any of his videos pass without watching, whatever the subject! Keep it up!
My Mom worked in big commercial kitchens for years and was already a believer in "convention cooking" and was skeptical like you of these devices. She got one and now loves it!
as someone who has both a convection oven and an air fryer, it's clear both do the same function, but it's also clear the air fryer is much, much faster when dealing with small portions, which is what i use it for.
I have used this at least once a day for 7 years at this point. Good oven AND air fryer. Highly recommended. Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro
My air fryer was a game changer. As a single guy I did despise having to preheat my oven to cook a single chicken breast, chicken wings, fries, etc etc.
Then the air fryer came into my life, and it became "put it in, hit the preset, walk away"
I still get what he's saying, but damn they are handy for single people!
Family of 4 - 6 our airfryer is used for 90% of cooking. Main oven only for pizza, baking multiple cakes , large casseroles or roast dinners .
I got tired of my small deep fryer and ordered an air fryer which arrived just today. Waaay better than I expected and the cost of oil is gonna pay for the fryer in no time.
Same! I also use it to toast frozen bagels/buns for breakfast. Really fast and keeping bready things frozen helps prevent me being sad about throwing out moldy breadstuffs. So convenient
As a single person, I really wish replicators existed.
Agree 100%. I have been in my house for over 2 years and only used the over 1 time to make some biscuits for Christmas. My airfryer is a larger one with 3 shelves or a rotating basket (great for chips). I use it for everything from cooking chips, pies, chicken etc. it's also a great tool to have when reheating pastry and other food that a microwave turns soggy. Simply heat the food back up in the microwave and stick it in the air fryer for a few minutes to crisp it back up!
I knew exactly what I'd be getting when I started the video, and I am not disappointed at all at the levels of air fryer snark.
Finally a TC video on air friers! Now I can finally find out my opinion on them!
7:43 No footage November
hē
Living by myself these air-fryers are great little devices, and it actually has replaced my big oven. Mostly. Even things like bread or the occasional cookie/brownie I will do in the airfryer. Works just fine.
Really the only time I turn on my big oven is if I'm having to cook for more than 1 guest, which is rare. Or when I'm cooking big batches of stews or spaghetti sauce to freeze.
Down here in NZ we’d call a fanless oven mode a convective oven and the fan mode ‘fan forced’. You’ll generally find the instructions on packaging specifically note convective and fan-forced with different instructions. Usually a drop in temp by about 20C and smidge shorter cook time. Fan-forced also tends to share the instructions with air fryer.
Huh. In the US I've never seen an oven without a fan that comes on all the time.
@@GeneCash that's funny, I'm the opposite and I can't remember the last time I've seen a convection oven. My oven, friends, family, are all standard... Even the more modern flat top ones.
Yeah that makes more sense than calling a fan oven convection. Convection happens WITHOUT a fan, it’s just the way hot air moves in an oven. Really weird to call a fan oven a convection oven.
Here in the UK we have a standard oven or "fan assisted oven" mode. I've seen plenty of non-fan assisted ovens.
@lsixty30 that has always confused me too, because convection is natural... Forcing air with a fan isn't the definition of convection!
I understood what an 'Air Fryer' was right from the start, so, I've NOT JUST 'Cooked chips/fries' or chicken and such, but, have used my Air Fryer to cook 'Fray Bentos' tinned pies, heating up pre-cooked pies/pasties and slices, even done some 'Stir fry' meals too! The ONLY thing I've had to do is, make up an activated charcoal filter and mount that on the back exhaust port to cut down smells and such... 😏👍 😎🇬🇧
I think the big difference between a "regular" convection oven and an air fryer is the fact that it combines the heating element for direct radiative heating, (like a toaster oven/overhead grill/broiler) and circulating air (like a convection oven).
Compared to the toaster ovens there seems to be also a lot more heating element compared to the surface area: the airfryer element is almost completely above the whole surface, while the toasteroven heating elements are much further away from each other.
many convection ovens, in order to more evenly distribute heat, reverse the convection fan at intervals. hence the stopping and starting
That would explain alot, and probably part of why dedicated air fryers put the fan up top so it can just go full bore non-stop
Every convection oven I've ever seen over a period of decades operates like this - the fan runs for a bit, then stops, then reverses.
@@VideoArchiveGuy in my career as an HVAC/R service engineer and gas/propane technician, my sample set includes mostly commercial and industrial equipment where reversing is not always the case. You can typically tell by the type of blower wheel installed: forward curve or backward inclined, single direction; vertical paddles, bi-directional
I got a Gourmia French door air fryer toaster oven. It does both really well. The fan is off when it's baking, it's also located on the side so it doesn't lose much heat when it's baking and blows directly on the food if you put the basket in the middle row. Best $25 thrift shop find ever
This channel is incredible! I have been thinking about Airfryers vs Convection Ovens for a while now, and this video really helped me decide what to do on the kitchen I’m designing, thanks a lot!
0:30 - THANK YOU for leading with this. This fact is why shopping for a regular toaster oven is annoying today; every manufacturer wants to call theirs an "Air Fryer Toaster Oven" and charge 15% to 40% more for the same box of toasty coils with an added fan.
(edited because autocorrect)
Which doesn't even work, because a large part of why air friers get food crispy is because the cooking area is small and the fan is big. Air frying needs really turbulent air flow that you just don't get in any of those toaster ovens with a fan.
I will say the Kitchen Aid Countertop Oven "with air fry", is probably one of the best appliances I've used. Easy to use the menu for mode, time and temp with its single dial, is great. It can toast, bake, air fry, and reheats food extraordinarily well. I will agree at 15:30 , the basket is great, because the oven baskets are such a pain to wash.
The breville smart oven pro also the best appliance I've ever purchased
The kitchen aid one is great toasting because it accounts for the temperature of the oven
@@roeserr Breville is THE king of Countertop cooking. But Damn $$$
1:45 of out hot eat the food
this meme has been living in my head rent free for years, thank you!
This is a good deep dive into air fryers/ovens. I actually own the Midea flexify air oven. So far it has been perfect for both tasks. One thing I like is the convection fan actually does turn fully off in certain modes such as bake, although you can turn it on any time. It sounds like it has a secondary fan responsible for keeping certain electronics cool. With that my baked goods come out perfect and anything air fried is super crispy. Technology...
The bit at the beginning got me curious about my apartment's crappy oven, so I open it up and lo and behold, no fan! No wonder it's so much slower to cook than any other oven I've used. This channel has taught me so much about my kitchen appliances it's a little crazy.
I don't think I've ever had an oven with a fan. But then, given ovens tend to last a while, I don't think I've had one made before the new millennium either.
I think convection ovens became a "thing" after 2000 or so, and probably only the "high end" ones at that point - no typical home gamer ovens had convection before that
Only very high end home ovens have convection fans and even then its rare, thats why oven stove combos are on 220 volt outlets, they heat with pure electrical power and insulation. Most large convection ovens are industrial, the ones you find at home are large toaster oven sized. Your apartments crappy oven is slow because the element is probably half dead and its poorly insulated.
@@chrish931 At least for Germany what you’re saying is wrong. Even my student accommodation has a crappy underpowered convection oven with 5 modes (convection, heat, grill, light, off).
We’ve had our air fryer for a couple years and it just sat on the counter. But about 4 months ago I tried some frozen burritos and wow I really preferred that over the microwave. Then I started using it for other stuff. The grilled cheese sandwiches are to die for that I can whip up. I use it all the time now and it is easy to handle and clean. You can basically cook anything that will fit in it. Great episode.
I have a microwave that doubles as a convection oven, and it features a "roast" mode that turns on both elements at the same time. It rapidly became my favorite way to reheat frozen burritos, as it's only a bit slower than pure microwave, and the burritos don't come out soggy.
You can experiment with pre-microwaving food , then put it in the Air fryer. I've had a lot of luck using both when doing roast potatoes, and heating some frozen foods. It tends to work best with bulkier foods, with thin foods it's a waste of time.
@@lmpeters my microwave's bake mode has not been actually used in ~20years, so turning the mode on just spits out smoke from all the oils accumulated on the element from ~20years of microwaving, lol
@@ThylineTheGay It might be worth degreasing it and experimenting, since it has all the benefits of a toaster oven and then some.
same happened with me. mum had a pretty new airfryer when she died, my brother didn't want it so I took it. it sat unused on the counter for two years... then the oven broke.
it took almost a week for the real estate agency we rent from to get someone out to fix the oven. I had already meal planned and shopped for a fortnight's worth of food and didn't have the funds to completely change my mostly oven-based plans... so I tried the air fryer and was very impressed.
I still prefer the oven for larger volumes of food and for baking, but for smaller things that I want crispy? hell yeah.
I think the idea was that you could spray a light layer of oil or fat onto the food and the air would bring the heat therefore frying with the smallest amount of fat possible instead of deep frying. I think the name air fryer was to differentiate these from deep frying immersion fryers.
I've had the simple kind but I love my 2 basket complicated version for being able to do 2 things at once with different settings.
Air fryers also excel at reheating fried foods and pizza. I like my refrigerated cold pizza the next morning but to each his own. Frozen pizza can be cooked by the slice well and quickly in an air fryer too!
If the basket is big enough you can do a whole bird (especially Cornish Game Hens) and bake refrigerated roll dough or cupcakes/brownies.
Thanks for another great video!
i remember seeing an as-seen-on TV ad for one of the first air fryers and they had a little tray you filled with oil
@@cheezitz6730 Kinda seems funny, especially having used my Air fryer so much, unless we're doing fries from scratch nothing really needs any oil and it's best directly applied so that little tray would probably be pointless, if not an extra mess not worth the trouble to use
_I think the idea was..._ that consumers are stupid enough to buy a toaster oven for $200 if we tell them that baking is actually frying only healthier.
But for $50, they're not bad appliances.
I bought a cheap Princess-brnaded air fryer - has touch controls but they operate in a very logical manner. It's been working flawlessly for 4-5 years and it makes cooking soooo much easier.
Nobody tell him about microwave airfriers...
That's a thing?
I have never heard this term, and now I'm annoyed. Thank you for your services
I would add to the definition of an airfryer: "Having a basket with a vertical handle, which can be yanked out at any time". IOW: all those toaster ovens etc, with a "air fry" option are just wannabes.
I have one and it sucks absolute balls lol, microwave works great but the air fryer/convection setting is bolted onto the back and is not nearly fast enough to cook things well
does still heat up the house less than the regular oven so it's at least a little handy in the summer for small batch stuff at least
@@John-yh5gm I guess it is now!
I have a microwave I got many years ago that has a regular heating element coil at the top for baking... I use it to make baked nachos, or to melt cheese on baked pasta dishes without warming up the real oven.
Only downside is you have to remember to clean splattered microwaved food off the heating element or else it burns when you do eventually use the element (if used infrequently like I do).
I love this channel. There's nothing else to say, really. I just love that I can get content like this.
You're a legend man please never stop
for reasons, i dont own a stove of any kind right now so i use cheap small air fryer as oven replacement for all my food warming needs, and it works very well, i could almost live like this all the time if only it could also boil a pot of water, one drawback is it uses surprisingly lots of kilowatts of energy
7:02 lol I literally have this exact model sitting next to me but it’s whatever revision came before the air frying trend and it’s just labeled “convection” with a little fan symbol instead
I loved the snark on this video. Simply perfect for No Effect November. Bravo!
18:10 I'm 99% sure the name was picked for marketing reasons, to hone in on their target audience. People with an oven probably don't wanna buy an 'oven' that's that small, especially when they know their big one can do the same job. But saying "it's like frying, but healthier because you're not using oil?" That draws people in.
I still coat my chicken in a thin layer of olive oil before starting the air fryer for extra crispiness.
And yet like a fool I still spray olive oil on anything I whack in my air fryer
@@afjer In all fairness my experience of actually trying to fry some chicken nuggets led to the nuggets becoming biscuits on the outside, so I do the same too on those. Rest though, I usually don't.
I remember when they were first develping the Air fryer back in the late ninites and it was all about getting the same tase as deep fried food with far less oil. If I remember correctly, I saw the Dutch engineer who invented the Air Fryer, Fred van der Weij on an Australian science show. At the time the product under development was aimed more at commercial kitchens.
While I do realize it's not actually frying anything, I must admit that everything i put in it comes out far crispier than anything I put in my oven without burning it. I can honestly see why they call it that.
I truly LOVE your content. I am an avid tinkerer and am passionate about learning new things every chance I get. Thank You so much. I also LOVE your bloopers at the end of your videos.
Great Video, I agree Airfryers are just small and fast convection ovens, but that is exactly why I love them.
Compared to my big oven it saves a ton of power, is easy to clean and some dishes are just perfect in it.
I disagree. Something that’s already been pointed out in the comments is that a good air fryer must exhaust the air to remove moisture from the food. Convection ovens don’t do this at all, and will not produce the same level of crispiness.
It drives me crazy that your TH-cam channel has existed for so long and i only found you this year.
Obsessed lol
Better late than never!
The essence of NEN is seen at 15:22, where the camera's focus point is set to the edge of the table so EVERYTHING looks blurry... And Alec didn't bother to take another shot. Never change
I have a toaster oven with a convection setting that is labeled "Turbo". This video taught me that if it was just a bit newer it would be labeled "air fry" instead.
I have a standalone air fryer. It sounds like a jet. Moves a fuckload of hot, dry air.
i used mine for the first time in about 3 months while watching your videos yesterday. i didnt mean to summon you but im glad it worked
8:09 not the B roll!
Alec, it feels too perfect... 🤔 You did that on purpose, didn't you?😆
Nooooooooooo
RIP B roll we hardly knew ye.
😱😭
Even more simply put, it's an electric stovetop burner turned upside down with a fan blowing that heat onto your food. Honestly if someone would have told me how simple of a design it was I wouldn't have waited so long to pay $30 for a device that simplifies my life so dang much.
I bought an air fryer some 18 months ago, and have not regretted it since. I knew it was basically a small convection oven when I bought it, and have treated it as such. The pre-heat time and overall amount of air being heated in my regular oven has always felt kinda.. wasteful to me, so when I saw a decent air fryer on sale I jumped on it, and use it more than my regular oven. Though of course sometimes I need to cook something that doesn't fit in the air fryer and it still gets put in the regular oven, but at least now I don't have to spend 50 minutes cooking fries (my oven takes like 20 minutes to pre-heat)
makes me think, it would be interesting to see the power use stats for, say, baking the same amount of fries in a conventional oven, Vs doing the same amount in an air fryer, would be neat to see what you might save on an electrical bill
The air fryer + pressure cooker combo makes one worth it 1,000% of the time
I have a Ninja foody that is an air fryer and pressure cooker it's big enough to cook a large chook or leg of lamb, has a 6 litre stainless steel pot with a stainless steel oven rack i use baking paper under the food to keep it clean, after cooking you take the pot and rack out to clean. I stopped using the regular oven and microwave for cooking for me was the best $400 investment
Just a small thing to add: There are two different kinds of convection ovens:
The "simpler" type just uses the standard heating elements and a fan. It's usually just marked with a fan symbol or a fan + the lines above and/or below.
The other and arguably better type has a heating element right in front of the fan (just like air fryers) and is usually marked with a fan inside of a circle
Our Bosch range lets you switch between both modes. "Convect.Bake" is the standard style. "Convect. Multi-Rack" uses the heating element behind the fan in the back of the oven.
Which mode is better depends always on the meal you want to prepare. You don't want to make roast with any fan mode, as it turns dry on the outside and is still raw on the inside. You should always use the heating elements below and above the meal and preheat the oven. When roasting small stuff, such as vegetables, my experience is that the fan with the heating elements in the oven creates the best result and speeds up the baking process but you should preheat.
For anything which just needs to get hot using the heating elements before the fan is best, as it distributes the heat most evenly and is by far the fastest to heat the oven up, it takes like 5-10 Minutes before the heating element gets turned off. You don't even need to preheat as the outside of the food isn't burned by the radiant heat of the heating elements before it gets warm enough in the oven.
I much prefer old ovens because they usually have an tiny vent which exhausts air and therefore moisture out of the oven. Which is useful for baking muffins, for example. They get crispy on the outside, as they should be in my opinion. No need to put something in the oven door to let it stay partly open, which is truly horrendous for energy consumption. The best option of course would be to be able to open or close the vent to save energy when it isn't needed; but that is an feature I've never seen.
Most people don't think about which mode is best to use when and then lament about their roast beeing dried up, their oven taking forever or heating irregulary or their food beeing soggy, because their oven circulates moisture-saturated air around. The funniest is when they use the steam-bake function for things you should absolutely not use it for (greetings to my aunt and the soggiest croquettes on the planet). Giving them an additional feature will just make them even more overwhelmed.
Thanks
13:50 You did NOT just Hamilton us like that, did you? That just ain't fair.
HE DID. Good catch! :D
you will never be satisfied
What does this mean?
More like 13:47 to get the reference. But yes.
So much for "No Effort November". That had to take some serious thinking to realize he could slide that in so smooth.
Had you ended the video 0:41 seconds in, it would've been perfectly fine.
Welcome to no effort November.
My teleprompter hates me and doesn't even work right.
This is an airfryer, but it actually is a convection oven, just a more portable one.
THE END.
See, I can use less effort than him. LOL
It was actually helpful
12:54 I prefer toasting toast with toaster ovens over regular toasters for two main reasons:
1. You can fit more in it than just two slices of bread
2. You can look inside and judge how toasty the bread is without having to experiment and find the right knob setting
I also like that I can melt cheese on the toast while toasting!
I love my cuisinart convection toaster oven. Best appliance I’ve ever owned.
Why are you wasting time toasting toast? It's already toasted. Round these parts we put bread on and toast that.
You can fit more in, but every slice is patterned differently and toasting in pairs in a regular toaster is not a chore unless youre making ten+ slices
I love how buttered bread turns out when you put it in the air frier. Then you get a crispy side with a slightly buttery flavor. With a type of bread like a bagel or ciabatta that has crust on the other side, you can stop there, but with sliced bread you have a less crispy side that you can put your choice of spread (peanut butter for me) on
I don't have a convection oven due to small apartment, but only a fanless Rommelsbacher Kitchenmaster 3001, so I do appreciate those little airfryers. Just like I appreciate this video
18:40 HEY, you said this was No-Effort! What's this blooper reel doing in a no effort production?
Absolutely no effort = no video
Shhhh. Let him cook!
well just because he put the blooper reel in doesn't mean there was effort put into it. he didn't put the nice square cutout on the right side like usual!
360F translates to 182 C, which is the regular temperature for making fries. Seems likely that is the reason it is "called out".
It has to do with chemistry of sugar caramelization, 360F is about where that happens...
It all comes full circle
@@rykemapo HA, I GET IT FUNNY
I do most of my air frying at 160°C otherwise it burns. Of course certain things can go hotter. Mine tops out at 200
I do mine at 200C, but it can go at 240C
Honestly i love my air fryer. I was under no illusions that it was anything other than a convection oven. But it does the fries things so well.
They are also great for hot dogs so you don't have to fire up the grill
Try hotdog bacon. Slice hotdogs lenght-wse into 1/8 inch strips, 400 for 8 - 11 minutes, shake halfway through. Great snack or for breakfast.
It's a convection oven in the same way that one of those Formula1 cars are go carts. To an extent they work on similar principles, but you're not going to get adequate results swapping them.
We've had an "Air Fryer" for some time now. And I was quite impressed with its performance. I also have a "toaster oven" for standard bake/grill/convection cooking.
I noticed a number of differences, my basket has a wire mesh base which sits inside the bucket. The bucket is heavily contoured to churn the air.
But what I have noticed is that the speed of air frying is about 30-50% faster than convection oven cooking. I think that is most attributed to the fact that cooking occurs on all sides simultaneously.
I'm also from "down under", so we push out c. 240 volts, so that probably helps too. If I did frozen chips for any more than 10 minutes, they would be incinerated rather than crispy.
So, 1 vote from me!✅