Before You Buy an Air Fryer, Check for This Setting on Your Oven
Although air fryer mania has faded from its mid-pandemic peak, the countertop appliance has earned a permanent place in millions of kitchens. Just take a look at all the starchy finger foods in the freezer aisle with air fryer cooking directions printed right on the box or bag.
And we get the appeal. An air fryer comes close to offering the speed and convenience of a microwave, but it usually produces a more satisfying crispy-on-the-outside, tender-on-the-inside texture than most conventional ovens can achieve, involving fewer calories than with a deep fryer.
If you don’t already own an air fryer (or if you do, and you just can’t be bothered to wash the basket), here’s a bit of good news: Your oven might be better than you realized at whipping up tasty, crunchy tots or chicken nuggets in a hurry.
Top pick
This Breville appliance performs just as well on air fryer duties as it does on toaster oven tasks. It also has settings for bread proofing, slow cooking, and dehydrating.
This sturdy, powerful stove with basic convection offers a great cooktop and baking features for a good price. It’s made by a dependable brand, and it comes in four finishes
Of course, an air fryer is much smaller than a typical convection oven, which helps it work faster — especially when heating frozen foods that are supposed to be a little crispy on the outside.
In our testing, a pod-style countertop air fryer cranked out medium-size batches of fish sticks, chicken tenders, and french fries about 10 minutes faster than the convection setting on a full-size oven.
Still, opting for the convection setting on your oven — or even your toaster oven — will shave minutes off your cooking time versus the standard bake setting.
Top pick
This fast-heating, easy-to-use air fryer cooked the most well-crisped food in our tests.
And when you aren’t reheating frozen convenience foods, the gentler heat of the traditional convection setting on your oven can give meat and vegetables a more tender center beneath the crispy exterior, says Michael Sullivan, a Wirecutter kitchen writer who has tested countertop convection appliances for almost a decade.
If your oven has a convection setting, and you want to get the best possible crinkle fries, tater tots, pizza rolls, Costco samosas, and other frozen delights of your choosing without buying a whole new appliance, here’s how to optimize it:
Consider using a crisper basket. “Baskets are most useful for bags of frozen food that are really icy, because it allows the ice to melt off and evaporate, and not pool on a sheet pan, which would create soggy fries,” Michael says.
And since air can flow around every side of the food in one of these baskets, you don’t need to manually flip your nuggets or tots halfway through the cooking time. (I bought this basket and tray because it had the largest number of positive reviews, but I don’t know how it compares to others like it — though I sort of doubt that matters much.)
Load your food on the middle rack, in the path of the convection fan. Small air fryers work so quickly, in large part, because the food sits inches away from the fan and heating element, so it gets absolutely blasted with hot air. The fan in a full-size oven generally doesn’t create such an intense convection effect, but the more direct airflow your food gets, the crispier the results.
Cook the food for longer than the air fry directions on the package. Again, the heat and airflow in a typical convection oven aren’t as intense as in a pod-style fryer, because the fan is relatively small, and the radiant effects of the heating elements and walls aren’t as pronounced.
For a regular convection bake or convection roast mode, the rule of thumb is to look at the suggested cook time for a conventional oven and trim that by about 20%. (Personally, I got the crispest results with the convection roast setting on my oven.)
