Latest news with #airfryer
CNET
14 hours ago
- General
- CNET
Ditch the Hot Oven: The Ultimate Summer Cooking Hack Is Sitting on Your Counter
I love grilling as much as the next backyard warrior, but standing over open flames in 90-degree heat feels less like cooking and more like slow-roasting myself. And firing up the oven indoors? That just turns your kitchen into a sauna and your living room into a convection zone. Not to mention, using a gas range with the windows shut is basically inviting bad air to dinner. That's where the air fryer swoops in. These compact countertop dynamos crank out crispy food fast, without turning your house into a hotbox. Sure, they blow a little warm air, but it's more like a light summer breeze compared to the furnace blast of your wall oven. Best of all, most air fryer recipes take less time than it takes to preheat your oven -- or sweat through another tongs-in-hand grill session. But don't take my word for it, I ran tests to see how much an air fryer would warm my kitchen compared to cooking them same food in an oven. The results cemented the air fryer as one of the best summer kitchen tools, right up there with ice makers and blenders. The numbers don't lie A heat wave requires creative thinking to keep the home cool and an air fryer is my ticket to getting through those sweltering summer spells without starving. To see if air fryers belong in the summer cooking hall of fame, I ran tests to see how much the oven heats up the kitchen versus an air fryer. Trendy air fryers are all they're cracked up to be, especially when it's hot out. David Watsky/CNET I ran tests to see how much hotter an oven would make the kitchen The air fryer turns out juicy chicken thighs in under 20 minutes. David Watsky/CNET To find real-world differences, I roasted chicken thighs in my KitchenAid wall oven (less than 10 years old) and a 4-quart Dreo air fryer, according to two popular recipes from a well-known cooking site. I tested the temperature before, during and after to see how much of a difference each machine makes. My Brooklyn apartment kitchen is on the small side, but it's not enclosed and opens up to the rest of the apartment. I kept the windows closed for the test, although it's worth noting that recent studies show cooking with natural gas in an enclosed kitchen can be a health risk. I'm finding fewer and fewer reasons to turn on the big oven these days. David Watsky/CNET The standard oven recipe called for the chicken to be roasted at 375 degrees for 30 minutes in the oven. Because of its smaller chamber, the air fryer recipe only required 20 minutes of cooking at the same temperature. The air fryer requires only about a minute to come to temperature, while the oven takes more than five. An ambient thermometer is all I needed to test how much hotter a gas oven can make the kitchen. David Watsky/CNET I placed a standard ambient thermometer in the middle of the kitchen -- about 5 feet from the stove -- at counter height. I took a reading before the oven or air fryer was turned on. I took another reading halfway through the cooking time and the last one at the end of the cooking time. Between the two sessions, I waited for the kitchen to return to a resting temperature before starting the next one. Ovens may have more capacity but they warm the kitchen far more than an air fryer. Getty The oven made my kitchen 10 degrees hotter than the air fryer Midway through the recipes (15 minutes), the oven raised the temperature of my kitchen by 15 degrees from 71 F to too-hot 88 F. After 10 minutes of cooking with the air fryer on 375 F, the temperature in my kitchen had gone up only 5 degrees F, from 72 F to a pleasant 77 F. You can feel heat emanating from the air fryer if you stand close enough, but it's not enough to significantly change the temperature of the kitchen. Read more: Here's How to Keep Your Kitchen Cool (and Lower Your Energy Bill) During a Heat Wave Not only did the air fryer cause less of a temperature spike, but I only needed to have it running for roughly 20 minutes with one minute of preheat time. The oven took 30 minutes to cook the chicken and 6 minutes to preheat. Using the air fryer will cut down on energy bills Even modern ovens use significantly more energy than an air fryer. Mary King/CNET During a heat wave, your air conditioner is already working hard. Heating the kitchen up with your oven will only require them to work harder, using more energy to bring the room back down to your desired temperature. For the AC to make up the difference for one 20- or 30-minute cooking session with an oven, it may not be a total budget-buster. Spread that out over time or for longer cooking sessions and using the oven during hot months can have real fiscal ramifications. For more on this, read my breakdown of exactly how much more an oven costs to run than an air fryer. What can you make in an air fryer? Roasted chicken in the air fryer is dynamite and takes less time than in the large oven. David Watsky/CNET An air fryer can do almost any cooking job that an oven can, although air fryers are typically smaller than wall ovens so you can't cook as much in one go. I've been tinkering with the air fryer a lot this year. I discovered the joy of cooking whole chickens in the air fryer, filets of salmon and even bacon cheeseburgers. The air fryer goes well beyond its reputation for cooking crispy wings and french fries. You can make dinner party-level recipes in the air fryer without breaking a sweat, literally. Here are seven foods that I only make in the air fryer now not just because they keep my kitchen cooler but because the results are as good or better than other methods. Here's our complete guide to air fryers, everyone's favorite new kitchen appliance. FAQs How much energy does an air fryer save when compared to a wall oven? An air fryer uses 50% less total energy than a wall oven does, according to calculations performed by CNET's resident kitchen home tech expert, David Watsky.
The Sun
17 hours ago
- Business
- The Sun
Popular air fryers urgently recalled in UK over fears they'll catch on FIRE – as shoppers warned ‘stop using now'
TWO popular aifryers that are sold in a number of major stores have been recalled after warnings they could set on fire. Customers who have one of two models of the Tower airfryer are being told to urgently get in touch with the company. 1 The products were made between January 2022 and April 2023. The Office for Product Safety and Standards warned the airfryers could overhead and go up in flames while being used. Those who have one of the affected airfryers have been told to stop using them immediately and unplug the devices. The popular devices are sold by companies including Argos, B&M Bargains, Poundland, Robert Dyas and Tesco. .
CNET
a day ago
- General
- CNET
I Was a Grilled Burger Purist Until I Tried This Easy, Indoor Method
I'm no air fryer rookie -- I've crisped, roasted and reheated just about everything in my beloved countertop convection oven, but I held off on burgers for one reason: I wasn't convinced it could deliver that perfect medium-rare magic like a grill or cast-iron pan. Turns out, I was wrong. If your backyard's missing a Weber -- and the smoky sizzle of burgers -- you're not out of luck. You can whip up juicy cheeseburgers, turkey patties and veggie stacks without ever stepping outside. One of my favorite tricks? Letting the air fryer do the heavy lifting. After air-frying a burger -- bacon, bun and all -- I am happy to report that making a bacon cheeseburger in an apartment-friendly air fryer is fast, clean and, as I found out recently, nets an equally juicy burger. Plus, you can easily get your air fryer burger medium rare via the super-convection heat that crisps the outside of food quickly without overcooking the inside. Here's how to make a bacon cheeseburger in your air fryer at home. How to make a cheeseburger in your air fryer Even a small air fryer can handle a full-sized burger patty and a few slices of bacon at once. Pamela Vachon/CNET I consulted a variety of different sources for timings and temperatures, but the process is about what you'd expect and similar to that which you'd experience cooking a burger in any manner: flipping the patty about halfway through for even results, with different timings depending on the size of your desired doneness. Read more: How to Tell When Steak Is Perfectly Cooked Without a Thermometer The air fryer works by circulating hot air in its contained chamber, so as a matter of interest, your air fryer burger will cook opposite to what you'd see on a sauté pan, with the exposed side of the burger cooking more quickly and becoming browner than the underside of the patty. Best Air Fryers: Cheap vs. Expensive Best Air Fryers: Cheap vs. Expensive Click to unmute Video Player is loading. Play Video Pause Skip Backward Skip Forward Next playlist item Unmute Current Time 0:01 / Duration 0:30 Loaded : 100.00% 0:01 Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:29 Share Fullscreen This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. 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Best Air Fryers: Cheap vs. Expensive I tried two approaches, both with a quarter pound of lean ground beef, seasoned simply with salt and pepper. Air fryer cheeseburger recipe Shape a single patty of beef about three-quarters of an inch in thickness. Place in a greased air fryer basket and cooked at 370 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 minutes, flipping at the halfway mark. With about 2 minutes to go, add cheese to top of burger patty and place bun into air fryer basket to toast. Remove all ingredients and build burger on bun with toppings of your choice. Serve. I also tried the same amount of meat shaped into two, thin, smash-style patties for a total cooking time of about six minutes. (Double your cheeseburger, double your fun.) Making a great burger in an air fryer takes almost no skill and requires very little cleanup afterward. Pamela Vachon/CNET Air fryers require very little cleanup You can cook a burger to that perfect medium or medium rare with an air fryer. Pamela Vachon/CNET Well, that was easy. In both cases the patties cooked evenly, with an outcome that was medium in doneness. (You can easily experiment with your model and ideal burger patty size to find the precise timings for your preferred degree of doneness.) The hot air circulation even managed to produce a bit of caramelized crust on one side. Because I could, even with a small, single-household air fryer, I put in a couple of strips of bacon with the single burger patty, since crispy, spatter-free bacon is another excellent use for an air fryer -- not to mention an exceptional burger topping. Speaking of spatter-free, this is the single most compelling reason to employ the air fryer for burger prep. Your clothing, skin and stovetop all avoid the sizzling oil droplets that -- safely contained within the air fryer drawer -- like to escape the pan during regular skillet cooking. The smoky, greasy, meaty aroma, which is otherwise appealing at a burger dive, but not so much in a studio apartment, is also minimized. Cleanup was limited only to the nonstick, air fryer drawer. Read more: I've Been Making Bacon Wrong. Here's the Best (and Cleanest) Way to Cook it There are drawbacks to air fryer burgers With an air fryer, you can't smash the patties down as easily as you can on a grill or griddle. Pamela Vachon/CNET The air fryer isn't perfect when it comes to burgers, and the drawbacks as I experienced are twofold. First, since you can't really access the patty while it cooks, you're unable to smash it down in such a way that it doesn't shrink up significantly while cooking. Since an English muffin is the best burger containment method -- I will not be considering opposing viewpoints at this time -- this didn't bother me so much, since the resulting patty fits the intended vessel perfectly. Expect shrinkage when considering the size of your patty before cooking. Second, if you're like me and believe that a burger without cheese isn't worth eating, things get a little more complicated. Because of the air circulation action of the air fryer, it's hard to anchor cheese on top for a quick melt at the end of the process. My first attempt with a sliced single, an ideal burger cheese -- and I am a cheese pro, so don't come at me -- flew off and unhelpfully adhered to the surface of the air fryer drawer. Am I seeing double? Pamela Vachon/CNET My second attempt where a slice was halved and layered for extra heft was more successful, even more so when I moved the patties to the back edge of the fryer basket, which gets less aggressive air circulation. This may just be a quirk of my model, but I'd be prepared to experiment. I wouldn't even consider shredded cheese on top of a patty, but I absolutely would consider a cheese-stuffed burger, which should work nicely.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- General
- Telegraph
Seven things to do with your leftover chip-shop chips
So you've had a lovely evening at the beach, with a glass of something cold and huge portions of fresh fish and chips – but what do you do with the leftovers? Specifically, if you can wrangle them away from the seagulls, the chips. There's nothing like a bag of chip-shop chips eaten outdoors, and although many may claim that there can never be leftovers of such a treat, reality begs to differ. And here's where, for cooks, it gets interesting. Because chip-shop chips have myriad possibilities, to the extent that the topic once went viral when historian Lucy Worsley shared a kitchen tip from a follower on social media. 'I have received a kitchen tip that would be HUGE IF TRUE,' she wrote. 'Can you really put leftover chip-shop chips in the freezer then use them as oven chips?' The intriguing post notched up huge numbers of likes and comments, with many respondents stating that instead of binning their greasy leftovers they enjoyed them second time round, finding reheated chips 'even tastier and more crispy' than when fresh from the chippy. 'Yes! Yes! Yes! I do it all the time,' wrote one chip-lover, 'and they're much better than frozen packet chips.' Recommendations for the best way to store and reheat the cold fries were varied. Dry frying is a popular method for renewing former glory. 'They'll fluff up like new,' said one of Worsley's followers. The air fryer, however, was undoubtedly the preferred method for most commenters. 'Store them in Tupperware in the fridge, cook them in an air fryer the next day,' advised one with another promise that they'll be 'better than when they came from the chip shop'. Tempted? Here's the lowdown on how to revitalise your old chips. Skip to: How to store leftover chip-shop chips The best ways to reheat Seven uses for yesterday's fries How to store leftover chip-shop chips If planning to eat them the next day, just chill the chips overnight. If not, freeze the chips in a bag. There is no need to freeze them flat on a tray first. Their oil coating doesn't freeze solid so they won't clump together. The best ways to reheat Leftover chips reheat nicely in the oven from both chilled and frozen. Spread them out on a baking tray in a single layer and roast at 200C/180C fan/gas mark 6. You'll need to judge how long to cook them depending on their thickness and how well done they were in the first place. I find the lighter-coloured, larger chips warm up best, becoming crispy, rather than too hard or dark. I get the quickest and crispiest results using my energy-efficient air fryer, but am unimpressed with microwaved fries, which turn out floppy and soggy. A large non-stick frying pan also works well, as long as they fit in a single layer. No need to add extra oil, just cook over a medium-high heat turning regularly until crisp. Seven uses for yesterday's fries Chip butty Reheat your chips in the oven or air fryer until piping hot. Give them a fresh toss with a little salt – and vinegar – if you like. Stuff between two slices bread (white is best, generously buttered) and serve immediately with your preferred sauce for dipping. Battered chips Toss in flour then dip them into a batter made from self-raising flour and sparkling water. Heat 2cm vegetable oil in a frying pan and cook for 3-4 minutes. Hash In a hot pan, fry some diced chorizo until crispy. Add a sliced onion and cook until soft, then stir in a red pepper and a chopped chilli. Cook for about 5 minutes. Chop up the leftover chips and mix them through the hash. Cook for a few minutes more, until everything is piping hot. Serve with a fried egg and a sprinkle of coriander. Tortilla Stir into beaten egg. Add herbs, onions or cheese. Cook over a low heat, turning until golden and set. Dirty fries Spread the chips out in a baking dish and sprinkle with paprika. Spoon over chopped tomatoes, grated cheese, sliced red onion and chillies. Bake at 200C/180C fan/gas mark 6 until bubbling. Alternatively, just melted cheese will do nicely. Poutine Reheat then cover with gravy. Scatter with diced curd cheese or mozzarella. Chaffles Take a handful of leftover chips and press them into a waffle iron. Cook over a low heat until golden and crisp. Serve savoury – with ketchup or your favourite sauce – or go sweet with a drizzle of maple syrup.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Aldi Shoppers Can't Stop Talking About This $5 Breakfast Must-Have That's ‘Amazing in the Air Fryer'
Aldi Shoppers Can't Stop Talking About This $5 Breakfast Must-Have That's 'Amazing in the Air Fryer' originally appeared on Parade. If you're building the ultimate budget-friendly breakfast lineup, Aldi just might have the MVP sitting in the freezer aisle. Fans are obsessing over Aldi's frozen hash browns, and at just around $5 a bag (depending on the location), these crispy golden patties are being hailed as a game-changer for quick breakfasts, late-night snacks and even dinner. Across Reddit and social media, shoppers can't stop raving about how well these hash browns cook up—especially in the air fryer. 'Oh my god—excellent in air fryer—400 degrees / 12 minutes!' one shopper shared. Others push it a little longer for that extra crunch, noting 14–16 minutes at 400°F gets them McDonald's-level crispy. Want them extra crispy? One user suggests 19 minutes if your air fryer runs cool. 🍳 SIGN UP to get delicious recipes, handy kitchen hacks & fun food news in our daily Pop Kitchen newsletter 🍳 And if you don't have an air fryer, that's not a problem. Many Aldi fans fry them in a pan—no added oil needed—and say a burger weight helps them crisp up just like your favorite fast-food hash brown. Others even claim they toast up beautifully in a regular toaster (you might need to run it through twice).But it's not just about convenience—these hash browns are genuinely delicious. 'The best frozen hash browns,' one shopper wrote. 'Tested all from major retailers. These cook up in the toaster very nicely.' Another fan swears, 'They're even better than McDonald's.' Shoppers also love how versatile they are. Some slice them in half and roll them into breakfast burritos, others layer them under fried eggs and sausage gravy and a few have gotten creative using them as a tasty quiche crust. One parent noted their two-year-old is currently 'hyper fixated' on them, and honestly, same. I accidentally discovered an album of my father's edited selfies. Made for a good laugh. by in funny The packaging is the only complaint. Aldi's hash browns come in a bag that's not completely resealable, and many say they get freezer-burned easily if not transferred to a zip-top bag or Tupperware. Pro tip: open them as soon as you get home and repackage for best results. Whether you're a former Trader Joe's loyalist or just looking for an easy breakfast upgrade, Aldi's frozen hash browns are worth the hype—and the freezer space. One fan summed it up best: 'Fire. 10/10. Eat one every day and have for years.' Looks like your next Aldi haul just found its star Shoppers Can't Stop Talking About This $5 Breakfast Must-Have That's 'Amazing in the Air Fryer' first appeared on Parade on Jul 27, 2025 This story was originally reported by Parade on Jul 27, 2025, where it first appeared.
