Have you cooked a whole chicken in an air fryer yet? Converts to this small, countertop appliance will tell you it’s a faster, healthier and often tastier way to cook most things.
An airfryer can save you money too – by halving the cooking time for some items, it also halves cooking costs.
It’s no wonder cooking purists, once skeptical of the hype, are succumbing to a “middle aisle” deal. Some new owners report not having turned on a conventional oven in weeks.
So how does the air fryer work? An air fryer isn’t really a fryer at all. It’s actually a high-intensity convection oven. It uses a combination of radiation and convection to cook food.
A heating element near the top of the fryer gives off heat into the cooking chamber – radiation. A fan circulates the heated air rapidly – the convection bit. This creates a very intense heat transfer.
While a convection oven is typically big and takes a while to heat up, an air fryer is small and takes no time at all. That’s where the savings come in.
Research by consumer magazine Which? found that households cooking with an air fryer can make considerable savings on energy costs compared to those using a built-in electric oven, particularly if you are only cooking small amounts.
Testing the device by cooking regular staples like a whole chicken, chips, a jacket potato and even a cake, Which? researchers found the air fryer used less than half the energy of an oven – and the results were just as tasty.
A chicken in an air fryer was cooked 23 minutes faster than in a conventional built-in electric oven, and it used half the electricity.
This more than halved the cooking cost too, from 31p (28c) to just 15p (13c), according to the research. Cook a roast chicken once a week for a year and you would save £8.30 (€9.85).
Cooking oven chips was faster too. The air fryer shaved 10 minutes off the cooking time and cooking them was a third less expensive than using an electric oven.
But surely the oven will trump the air fryer for baking a cake? Not so, according to the Which? research. A cake that took 56 minutes in the oven was done in just 33 minutes in an air fryer.
The cost was a winner too, with cooking in the air fryer costing over two thirds less.
The Which? research was based on UK electricity prices, but you can do your own calculation by multiplying the power rating of your air fryer (in watts) by the time in hours that the appliance is running and dividing this by 1,000. This is the energy consumption in kilowatt hours (kWh). Then multiply this figure by the cost of energy to get the cost.
The average price of electricity this month in Ireland per unit is 34.63c per kWh, according to price comparison website, Selectra. This is based on a standard, 24-hour urban rate comparing all providers with VAT included. This is more expensive than the UK rate of 27.03p/kWh used in the Which? calculations. So air fryer users here can expect even bigger savings.
Air fryers don’t have as much space as a conventional oven, however, so if you have lots to cook, doing it all in the oven together rather than using the air fryer multiple times may be the more economical choice.
