After hearing nothing but good things and after a year of persistent peer pressure, I finally decided to purchase an air fryer. If only I had succumbed to peer pressure and had an Amazon account, I’m sure this would have been so much easier.
But I’m from the era where I like to see at first hand and vet things before I allow them into my home – although using that method didn’t help me with my choice of girlfriends or wife selection, so I’m not sure what I was thinking.
So, I took myself off to Curry’s to view and examine the glittering and dazzling array of six air fryers on display.
This “examination” consisted of lifting lids or pulling out and pushing in drawers and saying “Hmmm” a lot.
Unless I was carrying a basket of food to cook, this was never going to be a satisfactory way of judging which was best. But even if I had, none of the appliances were plugged in and I find a lack of plug sockets very strange for a store that sells electrical appliances.
How are you expected to know how cool a fridge is or how well a hoover or air fryer performs just by looking at them?
Having finally chosen the air fryer, I confidently strode over to the counter and told the female store assistant of my selection and asked to have it delivered as I’m tired of carrying household appliances on trains and buying tickets for them to sit beside me.
People start pointing at you like they’ve never seen anyone with a hoover on a train before.
Obviously, I’ve never succumbed to peer pressure to learn how to drive a car either because I’m not sure I should be in charge of anything involving multiple mirrors. I’ve seen my attempts of trying to crewcut my own hair, it takes forever and never ends well.
The store assistant said: ‘I’m sorry, sir. None of the air fryers on display are actually in stock and we can’t sell these ones as they’re just for display purposes.’
It would have been helpful if she had told me this information fifteen minutes ago when I was clearly examining them to buy.
‘It’s a bit hit ‘n’ miss, really,’ she unhelpfully continued. ‘You just have to come on the right day when we have some in stock.’
She said she didn’t know when ‘the right day’ was but I guessed, knowing my luck, it would be the twelfth… of never.
And so I went home and sourced an air fryer on the internet, told my friend, came to a suitable financial arrangement (basically I paid him) and he ordered it for me.
One advantage of ordering an appliance online is that no salesperson is going to tell you how wonderfully marvellous it is – and then weirdly try and sell you an extended warranty because it might break within a year.
And the advantage of purchasing an air fryer is that they won’t recommend one of their team to come out and deep clean your oven for you every year, providing you remember to phone to remind them. Otherwise, they have better things to do with their time then wading through your grease.
Everyone just assumes that you can clean a couple of air fryer baskets, grill-plate, pan and a splatter shield yourself.
Later that week, a delivery guy arrived carrying a giant box and seemingly the weight of all his troubles on his shoulder.
I cheekily asked him to carry it up the one flight of stairs to my flat for me and he gave me his well-used ‘seriously?’ look.
There are 13 steps up to my flat.
The guy puffed and panted his way up to step ten and then forlornly threw the box onto the top step.
He was bright red, sweating and looked like he was about to have a heart attack. I momentarily wondered if his headstone would read: “Here lies Barry. Literally killed by a Ninja.”
I thanked him and he wheezed past me and back into his van and somehow summoned enough energy to drive away and consider a career change.
I carried the box into the flat and carefully unboxed the air fryer with the aid of some very sharp Kitchen Devil knives which at some point I must have carried back on a train without being arrested.
Once unboxed, I read through all the bamboozling accompanying literature, mostly about sticking probes into big joints of meat, before deciding that the best way to learn how to use it was to switch it on, put some food into it and press some buttons.
To be honest, I was just pleased it wasn’t a gadget that needed setting up or passwords, unlike the TV.
I’m pretty sure our grandparents would much prefer their days of buying a tv and getting it to work by hanging their youngest child out the window holding onto an aerial than typing in a password multiple times. The easier tech companies want to make life, the more unnecessarily complicated it becomes.
I’m all for simplicity of use.
Once switched on, I was confronted with, what seemed a simple display of buttons from type of food, cooking method, temperature and cooking time.
And then I saw the “dehydrate” button. I know I will never use the “dehydrate” button because I simply don’t know what that means.
I’ve never had a meal and thought ‘Oh, that would have tasted so much better if only it had been dehydrated.’
I refuse to go to Subway because their staff annoyingly ask me a zillion questions before presenting me with a baguette I could make quicker even if I had to catch a bus back home to make it.
If they also asked me if I wanted any of the fillings dehydrated, I would willingly resort to violence and ram the baguette up their nose.
I’ll admit, my first attempt with the air fryer wasn’t a success. I put chicken Kiev’s in to air fry and by the time I took them out, either they had been cooked so well that the internal garlic butter had totally evaporated or had been blown out of the Kiev completely as there was no sign of it anywhere. It was pretty much chicken breasts in crumbs.
Maybe I had inadvertently pressed the button to “dehydrate”?
But I had bought this machine now and was determined to use it and it wouldn’t be an expensive kitchen ornament – like my microwave that is rarely used.
I figured if I fed the air fryer often enough, it wouldn’t die on me. It would be like an expensive Tamagotchi.
Everything I knew about cooking – basically that 90% of food gets cooked or heated up in my proper oven for twenty minutes – had to be rapidly unlearnt. Twenty minutes on “bake” here would probably lead to the food’s cremation.
So there then followed some weeks of trial and error and a caution to reduce all cooking times at least to half.
In this respect, it’s brilliant to have your food properly cooked so quickly in comparison to oven cooking and the food taste healthier, crispier and more flavoursome than anything taken out of a microwave.
On some models you can cook in two different baskets and synchronise the cooking times so everything is ready at the right or same time.
I still prefer to pan fry some meals and stir some foods on the cooker hob and mine hasn’t replaced boiling rice or pasta.
I’m pretty sure that my next electric bill will be cheaper and that those savings I make will help it pay for itself quite quickly.
My advice would be, if you can, buy one. It will change your life.
Oh, and if you discover what the “dehydrate” button actually does, don’t tell me because I don’t want to complicate my life by knowing stuff.
I haven’t got the headspace for it.
Russ Writes 
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