Do you want to enjoy delicious, crispy meals without messing and heating your kitchen?
Then read our comprehensive guide to air fryers: Air Fryer Tips and Tricks Every Air Fryer Owner Should Know.
What To Do Before You Start Air Frying
It is critical to keep your air fryer in good working order. Use the suggestions below as a guide to continue creating fantastic meals.
Place your air fryer in a suitable place
Locate the best location in your kitchen for your air fryer. Always place your air fryer on a level, heat-resistant counter with at least five inches of room behind it for the exhaust vent.
Preheating
Allow the air fryer to heat up before placing food in it. This is a simple task. Preheat the air fryer to the appropriate temperature and time it for 2 or 3 minutes. The air fryer is warmed and ready for food when the timer goes off.
Get a spray bottle
Purchase a spray bottle for your kitchen. Spraying oil on food is more convenient than dripping or brushing it on, and it uses less oil overall. Oil sprays are available in cans, but some contain aerosol agents that can harm the nonstick coating on your air fryer basket.
Buy a kitchen spray bottle with a hand pump if you spray food directly into the basket. It will be worthwhile!
Aluminum Foil
Select a sling made of aluminum foil. Parts of the air fryer might be challenging to get into and out of the basket. To simplify, fold a piece of aluminum foil into a strip approximately 2 inches wide and 24 inches long.
Place the cake pan or baking dish on top of the foil. You can hoist the pan or dish into the air fryer basket by grasping the ends of the foil. Fold or tuck the aluminum foil ends into the air fryer basket, then replace the basket in the air fryer.
When you’re ready to remove the pan from the air fryer basket, unfold the aluminum foil and pull it out by the ends.
Proper Breading Technique
Use the proper breading technique. Breading is an essential step in many air fryer recipes. Do not omit any steps! Foods should be covered in the following order: flour, egg, and breadcrumbs.
Take care of the breadcrumbs and push them into the meal with your hands. The coating on the food might occasionally blow off due to the air fryer’s powerful fan. Applying pressure to the crumbs will help the breading adhere.
Tips for Successful Air Frying
If you operate the Air Fryer equipment properly and use its full potential, it can be a lifechanging kitchen gadget. Here are some tips for using an air fryer that can help you get outstanding results every single time.
Dry Crumb or Dust, Not Wet Batter
A sweet tiger prawn wrapped in a crunchy cloud of airy tempura batter is beautiful. However, before the batter gets light and crispy, it is moist, which is terrible news for air frying.
An air fryer is a high-performance convection oven. It warms to extremely high temperatures, circulating the uncooked food by a high-speed fan.
This is how a hot chip becomes crispy and golden without swimming in hot oil. This fan action is what causes issues when utilizing batter. The fan’s airflow might blow the batter away from the meal.
This causes a few of issues:
- Nothing protects the food from the extreme heat produced by the air fryer’s cooking function.
- This indicates that food may be burned or dried out.
- While air frying, the batter is blown around the cooking compartment and cooks on whatever surface it touches.
- It can make cleaning your appliance a nightmare.
The remedy to these problems is to cover your food with a dry coating.
Many meals taste just as good with a little sprinkling of seasoned flour – ordinary wheat flour or cornflour are excellent options. You may also coat them in a delightful coating of breadcrumbs that become golden when cooked.
More information on the benefits of dusting and crumbing, as well as flavor combinations and suggestions on how to crumb like a master, may be found here.
Don’t Crowd the Basket
The air fryer’s fan circulates hot air around the food, which cooks it.
This implies that there must be enough room around each individual piece of food for air to flow and heat the exposed surfaces.
If you carefully lay out a single layer of ham and cheese croquettes for air frying so that they don’t touch, they will crisp up and brown on both sides when cooked.
However, if you stack the basket or tray with a mound of croquettes, they will cook unevenly, with golden edges heated by the fan and pale and uncooked sections contacting other croquettes. They could even melt into a half-cooked lump. Not the best outcome.
Commit to cooking in batches if you want to avoid overfilling the basket.
Make 2 or 3 batches of perfectly spaced ham and cheese treats for a beautiful dish of crispy air fried croquettes. It will take longer than simply throwing them in the basket and turning on the appliance, but the results will be worth it.
Use Oil – Just a Little Bit
Several articles and recipes have been published claiming that using an air fryer provides fried food without needing oil. This is conceivable, but it may not provide the desired effects.
The truth is that you need some form of fat to get crisp, golden outcomes.
If you refuse to accept this, you will be eating a lot of pale, anemic-looking hot chips. Of course, you have the option, but for deliciously attractive chips, you just need a little quantity of oil.
Some foods have their own fat. Because there is a delightful layer of delectable fat under that naughty skin, a chicken thigh with the skin left on will crisp up nicely in the air fryer.
If you remove the skin from your chicken, you will need to brush the meat with a little oil if you want it to cook well. And this is crucial. You just need a small amount of oil to get that crispy, tanned surface that we love in fried dishes.
That is the fundamental health advantage – less fat rather than none. Toss a few teaspoons of oil into potatoes or brush a thin coating onto a pork chop. I like to give my croquettes and meatballs a short squirt of oil from a spray can before frying them.
Avoid Regular Extra Virgin Olive Oil (EVOO)
Regular extra virgin olive oil can enhance the flavor of many meals, but it is not suitable for air frying. This is because air fryers cook food at an incredibly high heat and standard EVOO has a low smoke point compared to many other cooking oils.
If you don’t want your kitchen to smell (and taste) like smoke, use an oil with a higher smoke point.
Avocado oil, peanut oil, and sesame oil all have high smoke points and are therefore suitable for air frying. However, some of these have fairly strong tastes (like sesame oil) which you might not want permeating your cuisine.
As a result, I advocate using more neutral-tasting oils such as canola, sunflower, and good old vegetable oil.
More information on the smoke points of cooking oils may be found here.
NB: While I recommended avoiding standard EVOO, this does not imply that all olive oils smoke at low temperatures. The exception to the rule is extra light olive oil.
Spray Your Basket!
Spraying the basket or tray of your device with a little oil before you start air frying may not assist with your cooking, but it will surely help with your cleanup. That dab of oil will assist to keep food from adhering and will make cleanup much easier.
Scrubbing crisped breadcrumbs from between the wires of an air fryer basket is not a fun way to spend an evening!
Accessories
Your new air fryer is a compact multi-purpose cooking device. Get the proper accessories to go with it. Yes, you can fry in it with very little oil, but you can also bake, roast, boil, steam, slow cook, and dehydrate in it. Depending on the type, you can cook practically any sort of food in an air fryer.
You should purchase some accessories once you begin air-frying. You could even have them already in your kitchen!
If a baking dish or cake pan is safe for the oven, it should be okay for the air fryer as long as it does not come into contact with the heating element. The only stipulation is that the accessory pan fits within the air fryer basket.
However, it has its own compact form. If you want to create a pizza in it, you may need to purchase a little pizza pan that fits inside your device because you won’t be able to use the large pizza stone that you normally use in your conventional oven.
Similarly, discover cake pans, frying racks with skewers, and specifically made parchment liners that match your specific appliance. It all depends on what you intend to produce with your new equipment.
If you buy your oil in bulk (like I do), a spray bottle for spritzing your lamb cutlet before placing it in the frying basket may be a nice idea. Otherwise, you may just purchase oil spray cans as needed.
Watch out for Overcooking
Although it may seem intuitive, it is surprisingly possible to overcook foods when air frying. Food may cook much faster than you think due to high heat and a powerful fan until you become acquainted with your new appliance.
Thin things, such as individual potato chips, are at risk of burning, while light meals, such as fish, might dry up rapidly if you don’t keep an eye on them.
So do. Keep an eye out for them. Don’t be afraid to open your air fryer’s drawer and check on how things are doing before the cooking time is over. Once you’ve got a sense of how potent it is, you’ll be able to back off and allow the experience to lead to how long you leave specific foods to cook for.
My main recommendation is to keep notes as you cook so that you can make the required modifications the next time you cook if you find your model fries faster (or slower) than the recipes you’re following indicate.
Timing will become second nature if you create the same food regularly.
However, there is nothing more infuriating than realizing that you prepared something months ago, neglected to leave yourself some pointers, and now had to approach it as if it were your first time preparing it.
Do this every time after Air Fry
- Take the air fryer basket out of the drawer before putting things out. This is very important, and you will only make this mistake once. If you flip the basket while it is still locked into the air fryer drawer, all of the fat or grease that was made will end up on your plate with the food you just air-fried.
- Don’t take all the juices out of the drawer too quickly. The drawer below the air fryer basket soaks up a lot of the liquids from the food as it cooks and from any marinades, you put on the food. If the fat isn’t too thick, you can drizzle this tasty liquid over your dish. You could also get rid of the grease in this liquid and boil it down for a few minutes in a small pot to concentrate the flavor.
- Clean both the drawer and the basket after each use. Please don’t put it off because the drawer of the air fryer is easy to clean. If you don’t wash it, you could get sick, and your kitchen will smell bad for a few days.
- Let the air fryer dry out by itself. After washing the basket and drawer, just put them back in the air fryer and turn them on for 2 or 3 minutes. This dries both parts more quickly than any other way.
Final thoughts on Air fryer Tips & Tricks
If you’ve never used an air fryer before, it’s easy to feel like you can’t cook anything. Even putting leftover pizza or frozen chicken wings from the freezer in the air fryer can seem hard.
With these tips and tricks, you’ll be able to stop feeling overwhelmed and start cooking.
How many of these tips were already familiar to you? What did you learn that was new? Do you know of other tips or ways to do things I missed? Let me know in the comments.
