The Air Fryer Revolution [WHY ARE THEY SO POPULAR?]

Welcome back to Air Fryer Bro! I can remember a decade or so ago when air fryers were just starting out, having noticed the only air fryer air fryer at the time (the classic Philips air fryer). My mind wondered about what this new device was and how to use it! Fast forward ten years and I am now a self-confessed air fryer freak! Our air fryer is used at least once a day in my household! And its not just me! Air fryers have been taking the world by storm, pretty much becoming a mainstream kitchen appliance. Go ask ten of your friends if they have air fryers, I bet at least two do 🙂

This is a massive change. Today I want to explore how and why this happened! Read on if this interests you…

What is The Air Fryer Revolution?

Having started the air fryer craze in 2010, Philips have now sold over 8 million units! When you add all the popular brands together, can you even imagine how many air fryers have been sold to date!

A market analysis report released in 2019 values the air fryer market at USD 658.9 million for 2018. This is crazy for such a new kitchen appliance, showing that the air fryer is now being adopted much more widely than when it was first released.

Go look at Amazon and you will see that the top selling air fryer has over 14000 ratings by customers. When you think that only a small percentage of a customer base usually takes the time to write such reviews, the sheer size of the market starts to become clearer!

An air fryer revolution is upon us! And I love it!!

Why Did The Air Fryer Revolution Happen?

There must be a reason behind all this air fryer love! This is what I could come up with!

Healthier Alternative to Deep Frying

How many of your friends and family hate fried food? I imagine its not many! Things such as fried chicken have become incredibly popular in most cultures, especially western ones. The thing is, deep fried foods often taste amazing, but they now have a reputation for being incredibly unhealthy!

An air fryer doesn’t cook things to the exact same level of taste and crispiness as deep frying, but it gets you something comparable and much healthier along the way. You only need to spritz air fried food in oil, so your intake of oil is much less.

I would say that this is the number one reason why a lot of people convert to air frying, or this is what I hear most amongst the air frying community.

Safer than Deep Fat Frying

When I was growing up deep frying was all the rage, and along side this was always the danger that your vat of boiling oil could catch on fire. In fact, one of the things I was taught as a young teenager was what to do in the event of such a fire.

The advent of electronic deep fat fryers has definitively made the process much safer, but I would still much rather deal with hot air than a vat of boiling oil 🙂

Compact

Early models of air fryers were actually directly modeled on the electronic deep fat fryers they were designed to replace. This means that you can’t really argue that air fryers are more compact than these electronic deep fat fryers. However, with such deep fryers you only have one method of cooking. With an air fryer, you have something that could bake, dehydrate and roast as well.

Where I live, real estate prices are high and kitchens are equally as small. In the past I have considered buying toaster ovens or different convections ovens to allow me to bake and roast. Now that air fryers are a thing, owning one has solved a massive problem in my kitchen. I can air fry, roast and bake with one small and easily storable kitchen appliance. This is one of the main reasons I personally love air fryers!!

Less Smelly than Deep Fat Frying

When I lived in households that deep fried, I can always remember that that ‘deep frying’ smell would end up stinking out pretty much the whole house. Having a greasy aroma running through a lot of your house is not exactly desirable. An air fryer gives off smells similar to an oven, and allows you to move away from greasy smells!

Doesn’t Heat Up Kitchen

This is another massive one for me personally as I live somewhere incredibly hot. My wife and I often complain about cooking in the Summer due to the heat! Our air fryer is able to replace an oven for us, and allows us to cook the same food with much less heat. A traditional oven would heat up the whole kitchen, but not so an air fryer. It is much smaller and comes with a good amount of insulation to keep the heat in. You don’t notice any change of temperature in the kitchen, even if the air fryer is on for an extended period.

Faster Cook Times

As stated above, air fryers were designed to replace electronic deep fat fryers and therefore cook food incredibly quickly (although not quite as fast as a deep fat fryer). For most people, the only other healthy alternative to deep fried food is using an oven. Oven cooked french fries have been very popular for quite a while now, for this very reason. The thing is, an air fryer can cook these same french fries in around half the time. Having owned air fryers for around 5 to 6 years already, I love the convenience it brings. I can knock up a whole meal in less than 30 minutes!

Is the Air Fryer a Con?

Sometimes I feel as if I am almost an air fryer evangelist, as I really do feel that passionate about them 🙂 One of my pet peeves is when I see those people in the chat of air fryer related articles proclaiming that the air fryer is a con, simply being a convection oven in disguise.

These people simply see the method that an air fryer uses, a big heating element coupled to a fan. They then think, I’ve seen this before with my fan oven or convection oven. The big difference is the power and intensity that an air fryer has. They use much more powerful heating elements and fans meaning than a traditional fan assisted oven, leading to much faster cook times and a more intense crisping effect. Usually, when I am cooking frozen food in my air fryer, I can almost half the timings given on the packaging for fan assisted ovens. Air fryers really are a much more intense way of cooking and are totally not a con!!

What I will say though, is that as air fryers have grown in size, some of the lower quality models have watered down this intensity somewhat. Some of the bigger air fryer ovens, for example, seem to have more oven DNA in them than air fryer 🙂

What do you think? If you have owned an air fryer for a good period of time, let us know in the comments section below what you think about the whole experience. I am simply a guy that loves air frying, and am always open to input from the community 🙂