Considering ‘frying’ is a method of cooking food in oil or fat, how on earth can oil-less fryers exist? Sometimes called air fryers, these fairly new inventions have stormed onto the market, determined to provide a healthier substitute to deep fryers.
We’ve provided an in depth discussion below, including reviews of the top 5 best models, but if you’re interested in seeing the information quickly and easily, here’s a table of our findings:
The truth is, they literally can’t be fryers, but as they are meant to replace deep fryers, it’s a clever marketing move by the companies who produce these products. In reality, they act like a convection oven, moving very hot air around the food. The draw, of course, is that rather than use cups and cups of oil like traditional fryers, these innovative products use a very small amount of oil (typically between using none at all and adding 2 table spoons).
But do they work?
You’ll find mixed reviews on just about every oil-free fryer out there. The reason being, each person who uses one and reviews it goes in with different expectations. If you are swayed by the marketing that says you’ll get just the same ‘fry’ as using a load of oil, you’ll be sorely disappointed. It simply cannot be the same if you’re not using oil.
Submerging food in oil allows for a quick cook and a crispy, golden outside. The heat of the oil will, if done properly at the right temperature and with the right preparation, heat the internal moisture of whatever food you’re cooking, basically steaming it from the inside out. As long as that moisture doesn’t run out (i.e., you don’t deep fry it for too long), you have very little risk of much greasy fat penetrating the food. As such, you are typically left with a moist inside and a wonderful crispy outside. That’s the basic gist of how deep frying works.
Without the extra hot oil to steam the food from the inside, it is common sense that you won’t be able to get the same moist inside and crisp outside. Therefore, it is unrealistic to expect an ‘air fryer’ to do the work that you expect from a deep fryer.
If you decide that you’d like to get one of these products, be sure to go into it with eyes wide open. There are some low fat fryer models that are great for giving you a quick, oil-free cook of foods like chicken, but be sure to know the shortcomings and drawbacks, as well. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to review the top rated products in this market, but it’s up to you to decide whether the benefits outweigh the negative trade offs.
Here are our reviews for the 5 best units we’ve found in this niche market:
T-fal ActiFry Low-Fat Multi-Cooker with Nonstick Interior
This was a tough one, because while there isn’t a lot of competition out there, there are competing views and differing opinions on each model. In the end, we felt that the T-fal ActiFry is the best choice if you’re looking for a way to get a pretty good cook without the oil and without the pre-heating time of a conventional oven.Basically this works by moving the food around at the same time as a fan moves air around. It has a patented paddle that moves slowly around the inside of the bowl, moving your food around in order to evenly cook all of the sides. While this is happening, a fan is ensuring constant movement of the ultra-hot air inside the cooking vessel. All of this combines to give you a really good, well-rounded cook.
One thing to note in regards to the paddle is that it necessitates the use of small pieces of food. Therefore, you won’t be able to put larger pieces of food in, and will have to resort to cutting up fish, for example, into bite sized pieces. Some people have also found that breading gets knocked off during rotation. This will depend on the type of food and how it’s breaded, of course, but it’s important to know that this is still early days in development in the grand scheme of things, and so there will be small annoyances like this in each purchase you make.
The T-fal is incredibly easy to use. Simply put the food in, close the lid, set the timer and you’re done. It boasts 2-button operation, which makes it very simple, and the unit is designed to stay even at 338 degrees Fahrenheit.
The machine itself is fairly powerful, with 1450 Watts of power and the ability to cook up to 2.2 pounds of food at a time.
Most of it is easy to take apart and dishwasher safe, so cleaning is also made very easy, which is typically a huge benefit over traditional deep fryers, where you’d be dealing with a lot of used oil. It comes with a bit of a cook book and a manual, of course, so you can start using it right away without wondering if the dish you want to try can be made in it.
Stressing once again that this is not equal to a deep fryer (just checking your expectations!), this is probably your best bet for an minimal-oil cooking alternative based on features, reviews, and ratings by real users. The 4.0 average rating from real users of the product put it right in the middle of the pack, but it has by far the most reviews and 53% of customers give it a perfect 5 out of 5 star review.
Click here to see pricing, ratings, and reviews on Amazon.com.
Philips HD9220/26 AirFryer with Rapid Air Technology
We were actually quite impressed with this unit after seeing it in action a few times. At first, we thought it would be too small to work well, but it turns out it can actually fit a decent amount of food (fits up to 6 chicken drumsticks at once, for example) and gets the job done very well.
Philips says you can fry (once again, this isn’t the most accurate use of the word), grill, roast and bake, if you want. Unlike the T-fal above, the AirFryer has a single basket into which you place your food, no rotating blade. You will likely want to pull out the basket at the mid-stage of cooking to give whatever is in the basket a shake to stop it from sticking, but otherwise it’s fairly straight forward.
Another difference between this and the T-fal is that the Philips has temperature control. You won’t need to adjust it too much between different foods, but they do provide a handy card to keep on hand that lets you know at what temperature and for how long certain meals need to be cooked for.
While the outside is, indeed, plastic, the inside cooking portion is metal, and it is made to high standards, meaning you should not worry about running into any problems thinking that you’re cooking in super-heated plastic.
Like most of it’s counterparts, this unit moves very hot air around very quickly, using Philips’ Rapid Air Technology. This means that you put food in even when it’s cold and it heats up almost instantly. This saves you a lot of time that you’d otherwise spend waiting for the oven to pre-heat, and since you don’t use oil for cooking in this, it’s much different than a traditional fryer. In fact, when cooking certain foods, you’ll notice the fat and oil from the food itself drips out and is left behind.
For people conscious about ingesting this, it is a great relief to see that fat melt away in this very dry heat environment.
On the subject of drips, the machine is very easy to take apart. Simply pull out the bottom half of the machine and you get the main cooking area. The basket can be pulled up and out, leaving behind the base, which is where the drips will collect. Both of these pieces can easily be taken apart and washed.
This model has a 1.75 pound cooking capacity and boasts 1425 Watts of power. It gets very high reviews both on Amazon.com and on the Philips website (although the latter is obviously taken with a grain of salt). Amazon users with actual experience using this give it 4.1 out of 5 stars, with 54% of people giving it a perfect rating. It was difficult choosing a best unit between this and the T-fal, but because they’re quite a bit different, we can recommend both of them as among the very best, so it just will depend what you’ll be cooking and how you’d prefer to use your ‘fryer’.
Click here to see pricing, ratings, and reviews on Amazon.com.
Living Basix LB100 Jet Fry Oil-Free Fryer
The highest rated of the bunch, we only kept this unit down lower because it isn’t as popular as the others, and hasn’t been tested as much. With only 12 reviews on Amazon, we aren’t satisfied that it has been thoroughly put through all the real life tests we want to see these products go through. That being said, it did come away with a 4.4 out of 5 star rating, which is .3 points higher than the second rated model.
The Living Basix unit combines infrared with convection cooking to give a pretty close ‘fry’ simulation. Get those fries, chicken wings and nuggets, fish sticks, onion rings, and more fairly crispy and well-cooked with the LB100, but just like we keep saying – don’t expect magic! It won’t actually be fried because there’s no oil in use. Of course the no-oil is exactly what attracts people to products like this!
Like the Philips above, this unit has adjustable temperature control up to 400F. It’s timer goes up to 30 minutes so you won’t overcook anything. The 2.5 Liter-capacity basket and ‘drawer’ are easily removable and both come apart for dishwasher safe cleaning. With 1400 Watts of power it’s on the lower side, but just barely. You’ll still be able to get a good cook for most foods, and the LB100 does give some of the most convincing ‘frying’ without actually competing with the real thing (not only does the oil cook it differently, but oil actually adds flavor to the food unlike most other cooking methods).
There are some noted issues with quality, but not so much that we would hesitate to recommend this. Just what you would expect with the odd flaw here and there, however, it’s useful to know of these things before you make a decision.
Thanks to the very high rating, ease of use and cleaning, highly effective cooking abilities, and general praise that real users give to this, we think it’s among the best choices out there and is a much cheaper alternative to the AirFryer which we talked about just before this unit.
Click here to see pricing, ratings, and reviews on Amazon.com.
Secura Infrared Convection Countertop TurboFry Oven 997MC
Dubbed a ‘countertop oven’, the Secura 997MC falls into a slightly different category, which is shares with the Big Boss that we’ll be talking about next. It is a versatile machine that does more than just mimic ‘frying’ and is a generally good alternative to using the oven for small jobs that you don’t want to wait for the oven to heat up for. For example, if you’re just making yourself lunch or dinner and you’ve got some meat and veg, you don’t necessarily want to wait for the oven to heat up. In the time you’d be waiting for the pre-heat, you could pretty much have cooked a meal in this thing.
Think of this almost as a mixer – there are different attachments to do different tasks (and hey, the lid even lifts in the same way that the mixer would!). For the ‘frying’ portion, you attach a spinning paddle, similar to the one in the ActiFry. The paddle makes sure the food is moved around and allows for all sides to be cooked fairly evenly, while the fan moves all the hot air around, helping to give a well-rounded cook.
It also comes with a number of racks that you can make chicken, roast beef, bread, and a variety of other things on. You can do certain ‘frying’ things with these racks, too, but you would then be limited to the amount of food you could get in comparison to a conventional oven. It just depends what kind of cooking you’re going to be doing.
We noticed that it does take a bit longer to do the ultimate base test – fries. Raw potatoes freshly cut (2 pounds) can take up to 45 minutes. This isn’t actually that long, but for something like this, the time that it takes to do fries is one of the bench marks at which companies try to best each.
For a more versatile oil less gadget, you might want to try this out, although like we mentioned, it’s not the best for large quantities of food, as some foods are recommended to be done one layer at a time. This particular brand is, however, better than the Big Boss, which is of similar design, in that it has a rotating base and can fit a chicken or small turkey. You can also do a couple pieces of fish and some vegetables. Basically you’re not going to get the fried taste, that much is evident even just by looking at the finished french fries in the promotional video (click here to watch it), but they could be a lot worse.
For convenience and versatility, this gets a nod of approval from Crispy & Golden.
Click here to see pricing, ratings, and reviews on Amazon.com.
BIG BOSS 1300-Watt Oil-Less Fryer
Boasting ‘triple cooking power’ with a halogen lamp, convection, and infrared, the Big Boss is of similar design to the above Secura. It’s a fairly popular model, but comes in with a respectable 3.4 out of 5 star rating. Let’s just say that by user experience alone, this pales in comparison to just about every deep fryer we’ve looked at, but since we’re comparing air fryers, we have to take into account unrealistic expectations of buyers when we look at the numbers. In actual fact, it’s not a bad product.
Just like the 997MC above, this fits on the counter and is a good versatile alternative to using your conventional oven, but again, doesn’t have great capacity, mostly because of the fact that you need to lay everything out in one layer (including fries, whereas the 997MC has a spinning paddle base that can fit 2 pounds at once).
It has the lowest power of our 5 picks, at 1300 Watts, but is significantly less expensive than the others (last time we looked, it was under $100 on Amazon).
You can set the temperature from a fairly wide range of options and use the timer to make sure you don’t overcook your food. Air basically circulates quickly around the food, much like the other models we’ve discussed.
For this particular model, we must reiterate expectations. We didn’t see great results for french fries – the cook wasn’t perfectly well rounded, partly because all the pieces were not laid out perfectly so that there was no overlap. If there was no overlap, and you turned the fries in the middle of the cooking time, you’d probably get a pretty good cook, but that means even less space for food and an extra step. They also won’t taste very ‘fried’, but that should be expected by now.
On the plus side, the size, if you’re not cooking something that needs to be layered (like a turkey or chicken, for example), is quite good. It’s 16 quarts, which is about 15 Liters. Yes, it will take up some counter space, but wouldn’t you rather have a near-instantly heated counter top unit than to wait a long time for your oven to heat up, especially if you’re only doing a small amount of food?
Overall, we’ve included this mostly based on the price. It will do a decent job of being a counter top oven, but admittedly won’t give you the best ‘fry’ factor. But, for much less than even the next lowest priced competitor, we had to show you this and give you the option to choose this bargain!
Click here to see pricing, ratings, and reviews on Amazon.com.
One Response
I bought the Big Boss 1300 watt, I fried chicken drum sticks and wings, after the 2nd try they came out great everyone loved them. I like coating the chicken with a little olive oil, it made them fry even better. A teaspoon of oil compared to 2 or 3 cooks used to frying will save you money. I cooked bacon in it, so I didn’t have to stand over it while I prepaired the rest of the food. I think you will need to experiment with it to learn how to cook with it but I can see this being a great cooking tool because it will make cooking healthier.