The air fryer, also known as an air fryer, is a small kitchen appliance that, despite its reduced size, represents a great revolution in food cooking. Foods can be fried without using oil, while maintaining the typical flavor of traditional frying. Thanks to hot air, we can bring lighter, yet tasty foods to the table for the whole family and to impress our friends. Let's find out together how to use the air fryer and how it works, and why choose this incredible kitchen helper.

Air Fryer: how it works

To understand how the air fryer works, we can think of it as a small convection oven that can cook a wide variety of foods without using oil, leveraging the high temperatures reached in the cooking chamber. When we use common deep fryers, we usually immerse the food in hot oil which quickly forms a crispy external crust while keeping the inside soft. In the air fryer, however, the function of the oil is replaced by a hot air flow that allows the uniform cooking of foods, exactly as happens with deep frying.

With air fryers like those from Ariete, we can fry any dish, even in large quantities, using only one tablespoon of oil. The foods will be healthier and tastier, across all the different preset cooking modes. Not just fries, but also croquettes, fish, meat, and many other breaded foods, both frozen and ready to fry, or fresh and newly breaded: the possibilities are almost endless, precisely thanks to the air and the high temperature, which can reach up to 200 degrees. Specifically, the air circulates at maximum speed and 360 degrees inside the cooking chamber, allowing for uniform heat distribution.

It is the hot air itself that ensures the dishes cook completely evenly, along with the formation of a crispy – and delicious! – outer crust. You will realize that air fryers have nothing to envy traditional deep fryers. In fact, by eliminating the large quantities of oil usually required, we will delight our palates with food that is light and tasty at the same time. Not only that, the air fryer prevents the formation of smoke and bad odors in the house, allowing us to indulge in frying meat, fish, and vegetables without worrying about the typical smell released by oil fryers. Plus, it is easy to clean thanks to the supplied non-stick removable basket, and it has a low environmental impact, as it does not produce waste oil – a highly polluting and difficult-to-dispose-of waste product.

How to use the air fryer

Now that we understand what the air fryer is and how it works, we can explore all its possibilities together, which characterize a faithful kitchen ally that we will hardly be able to do without. To use it best, before introducing the food to be cooked, it is advisable to grease the basket with a thin layer of oil – usually just one tablespoon is enough – to prevent food from sticking. While the machine should not typically be overloaded, with Ariete's air fryer it is still possible to fry up to 2.5 kilos of fries in one go, thanks to the extra-large basket size. In any case, the advice is to shake the food during cooking to ensure a better final result, thus achieving all the crunchiness of oil frying.

The air fryer is particularly useful because it can easily be used to cook all the foods we normally consume fried, along with foods that require dry heat to cook. In air fryers, we can therefore fry frozen foods like french fries, vegetable chips, mixed fried seafood, breaded nuggets, and battered vegetables with the internal hot air flow, as well as croquettes, cutlets, and shellfish. Since they function as a compact convection oven, they can also be used to cook other non-fried recipes, such as vegetables, omelets, roasted meat and fish, pizza, eggs, and savory pies, with the great advantage of reducing oil usage. This results in significantly lighter and healthier dishes, golden on the outside and soft on the inside with every bite.