The latest kitchen must-have is healthy and cheap to run – but as an alternative to a pan of tumbling boiling golden fat, it falls way short
There is only one thing worse than no chips, when you have been promised them. It is thoroughly disappointing chips. That’s what I now have: dull, mouth-drying batons of mildly soft carbohydrate, under a brittle brown carapace. They have been cooked, after a fashion, in the white plastic and metal box in front of me. I don’t regard the engineering involved as the problem. The problem is language. The kitchen appliance is a Cosori Air Fryer, and the issue is that third word. It’s called a fryer but, after cooking with one for a few hours, I can firmly say this: it does not fry. It doesn’t even come close to mimicking the glorious impact of placing foods in a pan of tumbling, boiling golden fat.
Not that people seem to care. So-called air fryers are in. Argos reported selling almost 100 of them an hour in September, while sales of Lakeland’s own-brand air fryer rose 90%. Posts on the video sharing site TikTok with the #airfryer hashtag have so far been viewed 4.8bn times. In the US, the market is now worth over $1bn, up 20% year on year. In the depths of an energy crisis, the appeal is obvious. According to moneysavingexpert.com air fryers can cost only 34p per hour to run against an average of 68p for a conventional oven.
