These picks are the best way to spend your hard-earned cash. I’ve been anti-air fryer for a half-decade now. Not anti for any functional reason; in that regard, the entire category is perfect top to bottom.
I used to have one I got at Walmart for $30, and, functionally, it’s as good as whatever the air fryer du jour might be. Reheated leftovers came out like brand new, chicken wings were restaurant-crisp, and it took all of 30 seconds to clean. It was big and ugly and plastic, but there was enough cabinet space to put it away, so that didn’t matter.
The problem came when my wife and I moved to New York about half a decade ago. Faced with a choice between a coffee machine and an air fryer—both bulky and specific—we chose the coffee machine. The air fryer got put on the sidewalk and had a new family within the day.
Since then, we’ve learned to live like our ancestors—no air fryer, just roughing it with an old-school oven. The crucial change came with a Ninja Crispi. We’re on a glass storage container kick, and the Ninja Crispi promised double duty: air frying and easy food storage.
After one week of meal prepping with air-fried salmon, potatoes, and broccoli, we asked each other: How the fuck did we ever survive with the old air fryer? The thing about air fryers is that the technology—which was invented in its modern iteration in 2010 for Philips—was essentially perfected when it was invented. Like my $30 version, any old souped-up convection oven that keeps food on a perforated cooking platform can cook crispy food.
It’s genius in its simplicity. So, I can’t exactly commend Ninja for making an air fryer that works—anyone could do that. I just want to tell you, reader, that it does.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
