Love-Hate Relationship on air fryers: Hot air or hot property?

Saturday, 11 July 2026

Critics declared the kitchen sink drama over when Air Fryer vs Microwave opened on the West End.

Air fryers are a thing. Which means either all other methods of food preparation are now obsolete or we need to put all the fryers and, ideally, their owners into a rocket and fire it at the sun. But which? Swivel-eyed convert CARLY GOOCH and artisanal overthinker MICHAEL WRIGHT chew the fat…

Hot stuff: Carly Gooch

I resisted the air fryer for a long time – until I ran out of excuses.

I don’t like kitchen contraptions. They clog up space and, let’s face it, back in the day, a microwave was a luxury. No rice cooker, no bread maker, no mixer, no salad spinner and certainly no machine that chops vegetables every which way for “only $59.99 – but wait there’s more, if you buy one today you’ll get another absolutely free!”.

I’d heard a million times how great an air fryer would be. My husband would come home from visiting friends and rave about theirs, how they cook a whole chicken in it in 10 minutes – not true.

There was no budging me.

“We don’t have the space, and it’s not sitting permanently on the bench” was always my comeback, and as the main cook in the house, the decision was final.

Or so I thought.

Cleaning out the pantry over Easter led to space being created on the bottom shelf. Coincidentally it was the same dimensions required for an air fryer.

That same weekend, everything fell into place. I was visiting my parents, and dad air fried chicken nuggets. He had the idea, then 10 minutes later I was dipping a nugget into sweet Thai chilli sauce.

This well-travelled Ninja even got a ride on Carly’s bus for the photoshoot – and it made the bus go twice as fast.

That was the moment.

I left their house, compared prices at Farmers and Briscoes, then bit the bullet, carrying my heavily discounted air fryer to the car and driving home looking forward to christening it.

I opened the 6.2-litre Ninja air fryer box with glee as soon as I walked into the kitchen. My husband was also excited: I had finally given in.

It sat on the bench long enough to cook the frozen fish and home-made chips for dinner, then it was wiped out before being popped into its space – the joy was overwhelming.

Since it was welcomed into the home, I’ve been thinking of ways to use it. Toasted hot cross buns, tick. Pies, tick. The best homemade chips, tick. Anzac biscuits … that’s a work in progress.

People say you can cook “anything” in an air fryer – but I beg to differ.

The biscuits were a complete faff because they don’t slide in. You have to gently place them inside the deep dish, trying to avoid burning yourself. A batch has to be baked six at a time, and they need to be turned over because their undersides don’t cook. It turned a 12-minute bake in the oven to a 30-minute exercise in how not to cook biscuits.

I’ve made peace with air frying biscuits. It’s not happening,

In other news, though, it’s great for re-heating fish and chip-shop chips. Where else can you do that, except maybe the oven, taking twice as long?

It feels like the air fryer has introduced a new era of cooking that will see kitchens designed not just for a space for the fridge, oven and microwave, but with a pedestal for the new and exciting machine.

Fried air. Yum: Michael Wright

I hadn’t even seen an air fryer until the other day. I truly had no idea what they looked like. Carly could have brought around a cast iron skillet inside a balloon and all I would have been was a little bit surprised.

Once the air fryers started multiplying the robot rebellion was as good as won. Before Mike’s beans were even warm.

Part of the reason I’d been avoiding eye contact until now was because I’m against them. I’m sure air fryers bring Edenic levels of convenience to their owners, but at what cost? At a certain point, convenience stops being the point. There’s no life left to hack.

Some things are worth doing because, well, doing things is part of being alive. That’s all life is: doing things or not doing things. And there’s a school of thought that even the latter is part of the former. No amount of kitchen gadgetry will override this.

And yet it feels like this is exactly what the air fryer is setting out to do. Or what we’re trying to do on its behalf: deliver some sort of endgame to cooking through … yet another appliance on your benchtop.

Don’t believe it. Even the illusion of convenience fades with time. Then you’re just left with a machine that cooks rice. You know what else cooks rice? Water in a pot. Like your grandma did. Or any person alive since the beginning of the Iron Age. And theirs needed a clean, too.

Take Martin Heidegger, who, when he wasn’t skiing or being an eensy bit of a Nazi, definitely subscribed to that philosophical school above.

Heidegger had a thing about what it was for objects to exist in the world. In particular, he had a thing about hammers. A hammer was a hammer, he said. Or words to that effect. But when a carpenter picked up a hammer to whack a nail, it was no longer an abstract object made of steel and plastic. It was part of a single entity, harmonious and ephemeral.

This was the form, Heidegger said, in which things should be perceived. Their everyday function. That was what comprised existence. And, yes, being German, he had an overlong word for it: In-der-welt-sein ‒ Being in the world.

That’s probably getting a bit far away from air fryers = dumb. Heidegger was trying to upend all of human thought, after all, not dunk on kitchen appliances.

But I think he would have disapproved of air fryers. Passively roasting a suckling pig in 45 seconds so the cook can go and be … what exactly?

Nothing, that’s what. No unit of living was maximised in the insta-nuking of this hog. Put your goddamn air fryer away and occupy your kitchen like a person in the world. Heidegger-ise a little. Then do the washing up.