Air Fryers are now so popular that their sales are even being used by economists when they try to solve inflation. They not only promise to cook faster, lighter results and an easier way to make meals without drowning everything in oil, but are affordable and compact. The best air fryers of today even blur the line between the fryer, the mini oven, to be able to handle the roasted, bake, reheat and more of its countertop.
However, although there are many foods, including a lot of surprising foods that you can cook in an air fryer, they are far from being magical. Take them too far and you will end up with unequal cooking (and even raw or dangerous), unpleasant textures or smoked and messy disasters.
As an occasionally excessive aerial fryer user, I have learned that there are some things that should not be done when using an air fryer. I have also learned that there are things that you should not even cook in one, no matter how many “hacks” those calls influential Tiktok publish to convince us otherwise.
To save both your dinner and your appliance, there are five foods that do not belong to your frying basket.
1. Frozen leftovers
Many air fryers now come with a dedicated 'frozen' button, and are excellent for french fries, pepitas or snacks stranded directly from the freezer, working in the same way that a normal oven would do it. But that does not mean that all frozen food belongs to the basket. Dense blocks, such as leftover lasagers, stews or family size cakes, can be a problem.
Unless you get the right schedules and temperatures, the hot air quickly doraks and the exterior hardens while the medium remains cold, leaving it with a burned bark and a little cooked and potentially dangerous nucleus. Even with smaller frozen foods, you must be careful.
Be attentive to excess ice crystals: they will create steam and do soaked things, and avoid overloading the basket, since overcrowding prevents hot air from circulating and defrosting/cooking the food uniformly. If your fryer has a frozen configuration, use it for thin foods in a single layer, and always stir or turn half to obtain uniform results. For anything big or dense, adhere to your oven: it will save you with disappointment and possible food safety risks.
2. Pasta
Pasta is one of those ingredients that, like rice, is not so suitable for the air fryer on its own. You need water to cook properly, and drop raw pasta directly into the basket will only give you brittle and half cooked fragments.
If you boil it first in a pan, it is a little better, but even then throw it into the air fryer without sauce or some form of liquid generally leads to dry and crispy edges. Technically it is possible to boil it in water in the air frying basket, but it is rarely fast, often difficult to control and always dangerous to move a basket full of boiling water.
That does not mean that the pasta and the air fryer can never mix, it only needs to be intelligent about it. The leftover macaroni with cheese in a mold, covered with bread crumbs will work. Like a bowl of Boloñesa pasta or other dish. But if your plan is to omit the water pot completely, the air fryer will not save it.
3. Funding chicken
Once again, an air fryer uses hot air to cook things, and put an entire chicken to roast there means that there is considerably less space for this air to circulate and cook things correctly. That is even if you have one of the biggest models.
More until that time, the part of the chicken that is closest to the heat source will also end up cooking faster than the lower part, which means that it will end with a burned upper part and a lower part that still needs a little more time to cook. Or worse, one soaked! If you want the ability to cook roasted chicken in an air fryer, you may want to invest in an air frying oven such as the Ninja DT201 Foodi 10-In-1 XL Pro or the Corsori air fryer toaster oven.
4. hamburger
Ok, it's one thing if you like well -made hamburgers, although, also, why? However, if you want perfectly cooked medium hamburgers, which is how beef should be cooked and consumed so that it is still wonderfully juicy and tasty, you may want to omit the kitchen hamburgers in an air fryer.
Maintaining a hamburger in a weird means means that you will have to cook it for less time, which means that it might not be enough for the exterior to be brown and have a bit of that coal. If the time cooks enough for the outside to be brown, that interior will be well done and dry.
5. Corn popcorn
Corn popcorn cores need between 400 and 460 degrees to explode, and most air freyers do not arrive so high, unfortunately. But, if you have one that reaches 400F, as mine does, you could also risk starting a fire.
Corn palomites do what they are supposed to do, what is exploiting, which means that some of them could accidentally lodge inside the heating element at the top, either because a piece jumped high enough to get stuck there or there was not enough space to accommodate all the cores stamped in the basket. That is a potential danger of fire, especially if that piece is still housed there while you cook another dish.
Of course, there are many tasty foods that you can cook wonderfully in an air fryer, so why not see our guides to make fries in an air fryer, French toast in an air fryer and even Brownies Fudgy in an air fryer? We can also help him teach him the 9 things he needs to know about his new aerial fryer and 6 common air frying errors to avoid.
