The Secret Genius of Modern Life, review: Hannah Fry jumps on the air fryer hype-wagon
Three series in, this was the episode of The Secret Genius of Modern Life (BBC Two) I'd been waiting for. Because let's face it, a good 97 per cent of all of my conversations in the last five years have been about air fryers.
Do they, in fact, reduce the cooking time on an average chicken fillet by up to 38 seconds? Can I really make delicious chips at home slightly faster, if I ever did make delicious chips at home, which I didn't? Was I as resistant to viral marketing twaddle as I thought I was?
So it was consolatory to find that Hannah Fry had also been in two minds about doing one of her excellent tech-splanations of air fryers, and for the same reasons – would it just be jumping on the hype train? Luckily, Fry decided to give the world what it wants – air fryers are now in one in three of our kitchens; the market has spoken, and her history of the device was perfectly done.
It followed the usual Secret Genius blueprint, taking us into the research labs where they destruction-test broccoli, before leaving you with the usual conclusions – this stuff is really clever, and thank God we have really clever people working on it. Otherwise my chicken fillet might take 38 seconds longer to cook.
I was mostly heartened to learn that air fryers don't actually fry, and that they're also just smaller, more efficient fan ovens. The heat comes from the same metal element that's in your toaster. The fan is the same type of fan that's in your… fan. So in the main it really is just a few twists and some clever marketing. But the story of how each of these components came about was full of happy accidents and obsessive inventors, just as you'd hope.
It is good to see that even as recently as 2010, when the air fryer was invented, it was one man in a garage rather than a research team at some patent-bagging multi-national. The story probably didn't require its allotted hour, but no matter: I used that time to go and incinerate some chicken wings in my new air fryer. Have you heard how great they are?
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