Frying in air?

I'm not quite sure where the inspiration for this post came from, if you can call it inspiration that is. I must have seen an ad somewhere - and I definitely remember Aldi having one for sale some time back.

Anyway I got to thinking about this new gadget which is "simply a revolutionized kitchen appliance for cooking food through the circulation of superheated air" and gadgets in general really. Christmas is coming up fast and the kitchen departments and stores are stocking up on the latest gadgets to tempt you into buying. This year the air fryer seems to be top of the pack although there are other contenders - the thermomix and slushy makers amongst them. To be honest I really haven't looked - as yet.

Grandiose claims like the one above are always made with 'revolution' being a commonly used term. So is this a revolution? Well I won't explain what they are - others have done this much better than I. Indeed go to this UK website, which tells you just about everything you might want to know. Suffice to say, that it's a Phillips invention (and most of the review sites seem to think theirs is the best), and that basically it's a way of frying food with a minute amount of fat, through the circulation of super-heated air. There does seem to be some fat used - the claims are 70-80% less than normal deep frying, but I don't really know how much. So this should be good should it not? Is there anyone who does not like chips? But we feel guilty about them. Indeed I don't make them any more though I did when the children were small. Mea culpa! Occasionally I make oven chips which certainly use less oil than deep-fried ones, but they still use a fair bit, and they don't really taste the same. Or is this really what air frying is? After all, in an oven there is super-heated hot air, circulated by a fan. So what is the difference? And the website I have given you the link to has a quote from Gordon Ramsay who says, in response to the question do they taste as good as the deep-fried version? - "Look – nothing is going to replace that deep-fried taste, so no, they don’t. But, the Airfryer uses a tablespoon of oil and the chips come out crisp on the outside and tender on the inside – they’re a healthier version, and they taste great.“ So maybe I should give it a go, but then again, maybe I should just give up chips except when I go out to a French restaurant! I do have high blood pressure after all.

Besides where would I put it? Now I am very lucky and have a beautiful big kitchen, complete with an appliance bench. I insisted on having an appliance bench in my new kitchen - if you don't have your appliances out - you basically don't use them as they are generally too big to get out and assemble. (They nearly all need some sort of assembly.) But most people do not have this luxury. Modern kitchens are often very small - indeed some apartment and town house kitchens are barely kitchens at all - they seem to think, and they may be right, that their occupants are not going to cook anything other than breakfast. So all of these appliances get put away, often in fairly inaccessible places, and therefore never used.

And will it be yet another of those appliances that you think are a good idea at the time but which turn out to be mostly unused? Like our cold press juicer (far too messy to clean), and the ice-cream maker - which actually is good and I should use it more - I just don't think about it and it is marginally inaccessible.

There are appliances that have stood the test of time though. The food processor, the mixer, the liquidiser, the toaster, the stick blender and the rice cooker are all gadgets that I use on a very regular basis. And I almost forgot the microwave - which I don't use to cook with but as an appliance to defrost, warm up, melt chocolate ... is invaluable. Some of them have been around so long we no longer think of them as gadgets. Then, of course, there are the things like refrigerators, fan and steam ovens, induction cooktops - things that our parents and grandparents did not have and which we now cannot live without.

People have been inventing better ways of cooking and preparing food for a very long time, but as in all things, the speed of that process is ever-increasing and so we get the gadgets that are redundant almost before they are in the shops - well I guess that might have ever been the case. Some things seem like a good idea at the time but do not stand the test of heavy usage. And it gives the manufacturers the chance to create something else for next Christmas.

And who designs all these things? I'm guessing electrical engineers by training. I wonder if you train in this discipline is there a holy grail of electrical engineering - like the theory of everything for physicists? How do they feel when they find themselves at Phillips looking at inventing the next commercial kitchen gadget? Do they feel they are moving the world forward? Do they need to feel they are moving the world forward, or is having an interesting well-paid job sufficient?

Now do I lust after chips enough to buy an air fryer? I don't think so. But then again ...