My wife was diagnosed with diabetes last December. We had a serious scare, her heart was taking a beating and she had no previous glucose issues, but all is well and she’s fine and following her doctors orders to the last dot. Keeping schedules and taking notes.

Our diet has changed radically.
MIL was sick two days after my wife left the clinic so we were back for another week and since being released she’s moved in with us. She’s 86.
Our diet has changed radically, i tell you.

Used to eat like a swine, now i’m partially subject to the ladies do’s and don’ts.

So, we are curious about the air frier. Is the food considered “fried” or cooked in a way that looks or tastes similar but not “unhealthy” as frying is for most people.
Is oil involved at all?

Please educate me.

Also, what size/volume is most common/advisable?
The cookers cost between $500 to $1000 down here.
Quite an expensive mistake to make if you pick the wrong one.
Better or worse brands?

Thank you.

0-0

We absolutely love our air fryer. NO OIL at all and we have cooked everything in it. Our favorite dish is the salmon bites, again with no oil. There are a ton of videos on youtube for any type of dish you would like to make. I would get the biggest size you can find for you two. Otherwise, you have to cook the meal in portions. As with anything else, there are a lot of brands out there.
Ours is a PowerXL and has served us well.

Wish I had gotten one a lot earlier. I have a small sprayer with olive oil, other than that you do not need any oil. Chicken wings, 400 degrees, 15 minutes on one side, flip, 15 minutes on the other side. Toss in bowl with your favorite sauce(Sweet Baby Rays Buffalo Wing) back in the fryer 8 minutes, coat again, flip on other side and another 8 minutes. So easy to make and clean up. Wings are supper crispy and moist inside. I dont even use oil to precoat for the wings only for veggies and mushrooms. Cooking time is usually alot less than you would use for the oven. Picked up a 5 quart Oester for $49 its about the right size for 2 people. I am already looking for another so I can do 2 meals at once. They do make 2 drawer ones also.

A lot of time one tends to buy an appliance and other than a few times a month it just sits around. Not this time, I am amazed with mine, you can even make hard boiled eggs without the water, once you find the right setting you can get them exactly how you want them. I have done Country Style short ribs, delicious. All sorts of vegetables. mushrooms roasted and then covered with blue cheese sauce. Fish comes out really well. Go on youtube and you will find lots of healthy recipes too.

Basically they are small convection ovens.

Some can be a bitch to clean. We have a round one that holds 6-7 wings. If we want wings and fries, we might be 45minutes to an hour cooking.
Don’t expect you’re going to get the same results as deep frying. More like a little crispier than oven frying. Good, but.. this is with ours. Maybe others have better results.
We eat mostly protein, so like gas grill, smoker, pan frying, and electric rotisserie. It’s amazing how you can pull a chicken, pork roast, or rib roast off an ele rotisserie and have it turn out absolutely delicious 99% of the time!

Think of it as a small, powerful convection oven.

Air friers are just convection ovens with a faster fan. Food from an air fryer I would consider baked. Now it doesn’t work well for some things. Take a burrito and throw it in the air frier, it gets pale and dry. Oil it like it’s an Italian going to the beach and it’ll sort of brown the tortilla. Nothing like deep frying your burrito.

Fried battered fish. I don’t care who is cooking it, and what recipe they’re using, fish will always be far superior in taste and texture when fried in oil. Air fried fish is mediocre, unless it was already pre-fried.

Now it’s amazing for wings, pre-fried foods, reheating Chicken McNuggets (better reheated than fresh) heating a cooked crust pizza, these are just a few of the excellent things in an air frier. Oh, fish fingers and corn dogs are incredibly great in an air frier.

I know there are health benefits from baked food over fried. I am not denying that. I however am not acknowledging that when I answer.

Alas, I am a purist (or an idiot) in the kitchen. Like those who hate electric cars, I don’t care for air friers to replace oil. I don’t microwave food, I cook it properly. It’s like fat free mayonnaise, why? Air friers have a place in a kitchen, but they are not, and never will be a replacement for frying in oil. I look at it this way, is it adding value to my food if cooked this way.

Almost forgot, made Sweet Potato Fries in mine, just chopped up potato, light coat of olive oil and then seasoned when done. Super tasty.

We love ours. Get the liner things for easy cleaning:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod..._title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

quote:

Air friers are just convection ovens with a faster fan. Food from an air fryer I would consider baked. Now it doesn’t work well for some things.

This is precisely what I wish someone had boiled it down to for me before I bought one. I HAVE two convection ovens!

Upside is it’s smaller so it might use a tiny bit less power. Then again, it may not because of the inherent inefficiencies of countertop appliances. All of that comes at the expense of the heat being vented out the back of the device, either towards the wall or warming up anything you have mistakenly left behind it. Ours also ends up leaving a little bit of a heated electrical smell in the air – that has gotten better with time but I really would’ve expected that to go away after the first one or two uses.

With a little oil mist, on some things, it does tend to simulate a fryer, but barely. Nothing battered is ever going to work properly in this, and the only thing we’ve really had good results with has been wings, baked potatoes, and frozen fries and such.

If you have a convection oven more a novelty than need IMHO. (I mean a real full-size one not toaster oven) If you don’t, then a practical inexpensive way to replicate one on smaller scale.

An air fryer is basically a convection oven, but with a much higher air flow. Usually, for anything that was traditionally deep fried in oil, you just need to rub down or lightly spray your food with olive oil and throw it in the air fryer to give you food that looks like it was deep fried, but is not.

We have two. One is a Ninja Foodie round air fryer that we don't use as much, but we do use it to make sausages or any food that we'd normally bar-be-cue outside. Sometimes the weather is such that cooking outside is not practical, so we use that air fryer as an alternative.

Our second air fryer looks like a toaster oven and it gets used almost daily, and sometimes more than twice a day. My son uses it to cook his tater tots and his chicken nuggets as well as toasting English muffins for breakfast egg, ham and cheese sandwiches.

I actually use the toaster oven air fryer on its lowest setting (200˚) for 10 minutes to dry out rifle brass that has been wet tumbled.

My wife is a traveling nurse and she sometimes takes the round air fryer with her on nursing jobs to cook Brazilian sausages. We'll also pack it on overnight or weekend trips if we're staying at a hotel that does not have a stove or a microwave.

I should also add that I see it as another tool in the kitchen. We cook a lot, so we are frequently using our oven, stovetop and our pellet grill outside.

Tony.

We just got one. It does a nice job but I think we have been eating more bad stuff. It makes it too easy to cook bad frozen foods like pizza rolls and cheese sticks. Liners work well for those too but I don’t recommend them for raw foods.

Haven't used the toaster oven in a long time. I found an Instant Pot 6 qt airfryer/dehydrator top and then bought the 6 qt pressure cooker on Amazon Warehouse at a discount ( a couple cosmetic dents). The combo is my primary appliance for finishing meats, toasting a slice of bread. I don't do a lot of baking but it's good for that (cheesecake). A rack for making jerky from London broil is my favorite application. I will pressure cook some chicken thighs and then finish them off with the airfryer top. Easy to keep clean.

Check out the Warehouse item in the link.
Instant Pot Duo Crisp 11-in-1 Air Fryer and Electric Pressure Cooker Combo with Multicooker Lids that Air Fries, Steams, Slow Cooks, Sautés, Dehydrates, & More, Free App With Over 800 Recipes, 6 Quart https://a.co/d/ivTrBHY

FROVEN Silicone Air Fryer Liners 7.8 inch, for 3-6QT, 2-Pcs Round Airfryer Accessories, Compatible with Ninja, COSORI, FABULETTA, Chefman, Instant, LATURE, PowerXL, Gourmia, Elite Gourmet, GoWISE USA https://a.co/d/6kLhJNH

I just wanted to add one thing non air fryer related.
When it comes to Doctors, Mechanics, Financial Advisors, and Church. Listen, check and verify!
There are probably more we could add to the list!
Good luck!

Like Sigsentry said, Jerky. Mine has a dehydrator setting but I have not tried that yet.

One thing that I was thinking, an air frier is almost a replacement for the microwave. All the stuff I would heat in a microwave, I would prefer heated in an air frier, with the exception of liquids.

As Tony said, it’s another tool in the kitchen. It definitely has a place, even in my kitchen. For me and the way we cook, it’s more of a heating or reheating device.

quote:

Originally posted by TBH:
I just wanted to add one thing non air fryer related.
When it comes to Doctors, Mechanics, Financial Advisors, and Church. Listen, check and verify!
There are probably more we could add to the list!
Good luck!

Agree. But wife was headed for an early grave when Cardiologist read her blood test and sent her immediately to the Diabetologist. They kept her for four nights to get her sugar under control.
Now her blood pressure is back to normal and she watches her food.

Her eyesight was going downhill and she could turn to Godzilla with toothache in a nanosecond. All that is gone.

We didn’t see this coming. At all.

0-0

Any advantages or disadvantages between the models that look like a regular oven and those that have a drawer/bowl?

0-0

0-0, not related to air fryers, but FWIW a video by doctor Jason Fung treating and in some cases reversing diabetic patients that you and your wife might find interesting. I have no diabetic issue at all and I did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEszxSqjyc4

Correct me if I'm wrong , but I believe the standard in Argentina is 220v 50hz . All of these suggestions for this model or that one are not going to work .

We have a Ninja Foodi XL Grill. Model FG551H Series S5. We use it indoors and grill our meats on it. It does a wonderful job. Set it to Grill. Put it on Medium. Let it preheat. Then cook for 5 minutes. Flip. Cook for 5 more minutes and its done. It can cook 4 burgers at the same time.