Is it cheaper to cook with an air fryer?
- Published
In my consumer programme, Sliced Bread, I investigate whether the latest wonder-products are indeed the best thing since sliced bread, or just marketing hype.
With food and energy prices increasing at their fastest rate in 40 years, people are looking for advice on the cheapest ways to cook food. So when listeners asked me whether an air fryer really was good value for money, my team and I decided to investigate.
How does an air fryer work?
An air fryer is about the same size as a breadmaker and sits on your kitchen counter. It cooks by blowing very hot air, at high speed, all around the food.
"It's basically a very strong, very hot wind," says Dr Jakub Radzikowski, Culinary Education Designer at Imperial College London. "You could compare it to drying your hair with a hairdryer."
It works in a similar way to a convection fan oven, Dr Radzikowski explains, but because it is smaller and has a stronger fan, the air currents can be as strong as those in a commercial oven.
The combination of a powerful fan and a smaller compartment makes the air fryer more efficient and reduces the time needed to pre-heat it.
"If I have a chicken thigh, I will probably cook it for 20 minutes in an air fryer. In an oven it would take longer," he says.
That said, an air fryer has its drawbacks. Because the drawer has less capacity, you can only cook smaller amounts.
"If you're cooking for four people or six people, the time saving doesn't work anymore because you have to cook in batches in the air fryer," says Dr Radzikowski.
How much energy does it use?
For the Sliced Bread programme, producer Simon performed two tests.
In the first, he cooked one chicken leg in his usual oven, and then one same-sized chicken leg in his air fryer; in the second, he cooked one jacket potato in his oven and then one same-sized jacket potato in his air fryer.
The oven was an electric convection fan oven, and Simon was careful to make sure other appliances around his house were switched off while he was cooking.
He used his smart meter readings to see how much energy he used, and we then crunched the numbers to calculate the costs of cooking the items in an oven versus an air fryer.
In October, the government set a limit the energy companies can charge for a unit of electricity. The limit is now 34p per kWh (kilowatt hours) unit of electricity so we used that figure to calculate the maximum Simon's cooking costs could rise.
In the regular oven, the chicken took 35 minutes to cook and used 1.05 kWh of electricity, working out at a cost of 35.7p.
Cooking the chicken in the air fryer took 20 minutes and used 0.43 kWh of electricity, at a cost of 14.6p.
The potato took approximately an hour to cook in the oven, using 1.31 KWh, at a cost of 44.5p.
In the air fryer, the potato took 35 minutes, using 0.55 kWh of electricity, costing 18.1p.
So - allowing for small variations like how old your oven is, and how much energy it uses - cooking in an electric oven costs more than double what it costs to cook in an air fryer. But only if you cook all your food in the same batch in the air fryer.
What about the other costs?
Some listeners got in touch to note that we didn't include the initial cost of an air fryer in our calculations. Indeed, if you bought a £50 air fryer and you save, 20 pence per cook, it's going to take you 250 cooks until you break even. Using it 3 times a week, that's 83 weeks.
However, you also have to buy an oven (although that is likely to be factored into rent/or the purchase price of a property). Also some people - like me - have a second hand air fryer or got one as a gift.
How did the food taste?
As well as being a cost-effective way of cooking, our producer also told me air fryers are a tasty one.
He said the chicken legs cooked in the air fryer had crisp skin but the meat wasn't dry and retained a lovely juiciness. The oven chicken legs were drier. But he preferred the way the fan oven cooked the skin of the jacket potato, perhaps because it took longer to cook. The rest of the potato, he said, tasted exactly the same in both.
The new series of Sliced Bread returns to BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds on 3 November.
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