But there is a cost to the enticing taste of fried foods. The oils used to cook them are related by studies to health issues such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.
Enter air fryers—appliances that promise all the fat and calories without the taste, texture, and golden-brown colour of oil-fried foods. But can these substitutes for deep fryers deliver on their promise?
How do Air Fryers work?
Square or egg-shaped machines, around the size of a coffee maker, are air fryers that sit on your countertop. In a slide-out basket, you put the food you want to fry — chopped potatoes, chicken nuggets, zucchini slices. You can toss it with a thin coating of oil if you like.
A fan drives hot air around the food — up to 400 F —. It's a bit like an oven with convection.
Second, the moving air cooks the outside of food, which provides a crispy brown coating and like deep-fried foods, leaves the inside soft. A bottle below the basket collects any grease that drops as the food cooks.
Bottom line: Without all the oil, air fryers produce the crispy, chewy foods that people enjoy.
What can be cooked in an Air Fryer?
An air fryer can cook almost everything in oil that you would normally fry, such as:
Chicken, including chicken fingers and nuggets
Onion rings and french fries
Vegetables
Fish
Cheese sticks
Doughnuts
Pizza
There are also toast and baking settings in some versions, making them more like traditional ovens. These can be used to make brownies or to roast chicken. The limited basket size, which leaves little space to cook an entire family meal, is one downside of many of these devices. You can check out more healthy air fryer recipes in this article.
Are foods in an Air Fryer good for you?
Air frying is by certain standards, healthier than frying in grease. It decreases calories by 70% to 80% and has a lot less fat.
Any of the other adverse effects of oil frying may also be minimised by this form of cooking. When you fry potatoes or other starchy foods, the reaction that occurs produces the chemical acrylamide, which research ties to higher cancer chances. One study shows that the amount of acrylamide in fried potatoes is decreased by 90 percent by air frying.
Some air-frying stuff might not be better for you though. Air frying of fish increased the quantity of a material called 'cholesterol oxidation products' (COPs) in one study. COPs form when during cooking, the cholesterol in meat or fish breaks down. These substances are related by studies to coronary heart disease, artery hardening, cancer and other diseases.
The study reveals that one way to lower the number of COPs when you air fried fish is to add fresh parsley, chives, or a combination of the two. Research shows that these herbs function in air-fried foods as antioxidants to decrease Police.
It also appears that air frying curbs the omega-3 fatty acids in fish. These "good fats" help reduce blood pressure and increase the levels of "good" HDL cholesterol, and may help protect the heart.
How does food cooked in Air Fryer taste?
Are air-fried foods as delicious as the classic style? It's subjective at the end of the day.
The batter absorbs the oil you used to cook it when you fried food. That gives fried foods on the outside their happy crunch while keeping the inside moist. Frying also adds a deep, dark colour to foods that is appealing to the eye.
With air frying, you always get a crunch, but it doesn't produce the same look or sound of the mouth like oil frying. One research contrasting oil frying with air frying showed that the two methods led to foods with different textures and sensory qualities, but with a similar colour and moisture content.
Your technique for cooking matters, too. Your food will cook unevenly if you crowd the small basket too much, giving you a few crunchy and some soggy spots.
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