>>21702327
>long ago
I don't know why that made me laugh so hard. Air fryers are 20 years old, but those ones were like the 3 a.m. infomercial ones that cost you 3 payments of $44.44 or something.
The recent craze is these $50 and under ones that are super shitty that people get on Amazon or at Walmart like a toaster, they hold like a cubic gallon at best, and most really are not designed for real cooking at that quality.
It's just taking something and pushing it beyond its natural limits. Some of the people here pushing back do have fancy steel models with rotisseries built in or bluetooth bullshit, or a glass front door. I've seen those, and yeah, they can totally roast one chicken and I wouldn't scoff at it.
But for every one of those people there's some dunce with the $25 fire hazard model from Taiwan who's making taco meat in it on a little bowl of foil, pulling the drawer out every 4 minutes and stirring it around. They even sell silicone inserts for the drawer baskets that encourage these guys to directly fill their the thing with greased up potatoes and then dump in eggs and cheese and bake a fucking casserole in there.
If you're living in a dorm room and this is your alternative to a microwave and a hotplate, I'll cut you some slack. But if this thing is your new best friend and most reliable kitchen appliance responsible for half of what you cook, you're really limiting yourself and misusing it to some extent. You're shorting yourself on quality. Aside from a few frozen products, the air fryer doesn't really excel at anything. And of course all of those things are better actually deep fried, obviously.
