Airfryers – Out Already?

Alas poor airfryer, we knew thee for but a short time. Not that I care for a clickbait headline nor an article that’s trying to make “frequent fryer” miles, but okay – I want to brag. The “new kid on the block” is a tabletop convection oven. They’ve been available for several decades now. Honest. I bought one secondhand for ten bucks.

The “Halogen oven” they refer to is actually one of a whole slew of countertop/tabletop convection ovens. I remember seeing ads for them last century – I think – and they were expensive for the day. You can still buy the round glass jobbies as well as the more conventional square shapes with metal cabinets. I can attest to the round variety, having bought one secondhand for ten bucks a few years ago. You can buy new ones of various designs today for between the price of a cheap air fryer and a microwave.

The only difference between mine and the “Halogen” ones is that they, as the name implies, use a halogen lamp heating element whereas mine has a non-bright-shining metal element. I’ve since found dozens of these in second-hand and thrift stores, almost all of the halogen light variety. First of all – if you’ve ever used a halogen room heater you already know that it’s very bright.

So bright that neighbours sometimes wondered if a UFO had landed next door… And the light flicks on and off depending on the thermostat setting, which thermally stresses the quartz glass tube.

Wasting all that energy as light isn’t great. More importantly, quartz halogen lights back then were fragile and also suffered from thermal stressing. If the light just stopped working well then you could replace it I guess – but if (as happened) the glass tube exploded, then your roast had to go in the bin unless you wanted to eat glass slivers. I never fancied any of those scenarios so when I saw this one with a conventional element I pounced on it…

(Bad Photo Warning)

You can see there’s no glass tube in this one – that’s the kind you want.

Apologies for the mediocre photos I only took them for documentary purposes after I bought the thing.

The metal shield thing fixes the one other issue these have – the hot air comes too close to larger items like a chicken, this allows lifting the fan / heater unit another 10cm higher, preventing burning of the top of an item to be cooked

Also, convection ovens and air fryers are just a fan-forced oven in a different form factor. But as with induction cooking, they’re faster than the conventional electric oven and competitive with gas. This unit was branded “CookWell” and has no trouble heating up to four pre-cooked meat pies from frozen to baked crisp in around 25 – 35 minutes. There’s no “pre-heat the oven to xxx degrees” period due to the small volume of the device and the fan-forced heating. The same pies would need around 45 minutes in our conventional electric oven if you include the pre-heat time.

And I still find air “fryers” to be a fantastic kitchen device as they’re similarly quick to heat and cook things, as long as you keep in mind that the main way they seem more efficient is that they only have to heat a much smaller volume.

Steam Ovens

You can now buy things called “steam ovens” which are air ovens with a twist – they circulate superhot steam instead of just air. The air ovens work because they can deliver moving hot air to the food, and that reduces the thickness of the cold air barrier around the food, bringing hot air closer to it. Steam ovens capitalise on this by using water vapour which has a higher heat transfer capacity.of this writing these were still stupidly expensive but a lot of people swear they’re actually the next big thing.