Whether you should pre-heat your air fryer is a hotly debated topic. The popular American manufacturer Ninja, say their air fryers don’t need to be pre-heated, but yet Cosori and other brands make their air fryers with a pre-heat option, so which are the two is it? I decided to answer the question once and for all by doing some real-world testing in my kitchen.
Why do we preheat at all?
Before we look at air fryers it is important to understand why we preheat ovens at all. There are two main reasons
(1) Pre-heating is done to ensure that the timings on recipes are correct. As every oven is slightly different if all of them are allowed to reach the same temperature before cooking time begins than they should all take the same amount of time to cook the dish
(2) Certain dishes mainly ones that rise need to go into a hot oven to ensure the immediate blast of heat gets the best rise out of the ingredients, additionally, certain joints of meat benefit from a hot blast that seals the outside of the meat before cooking begins, but the most temperamental of dishes which may suffer adverse effects if they aren’t put in a preheated oven are baking dishes.
How do air fryers differ from ovens when it comes to preheating?
The average British oven is 60 litres capacity and depending on age and brand can take up to 20 minutes to come to temperature. In comparison and air fryer is generally less than ten litres capacity and less than 5 in the case of dual basket models. Air fryers will usually reach temperature in less than 5 minutes.
Does my make of air fryer matter?
Not really. All air fryers are broadly similar. They excel at getting to high temperatures quickly and having a powerful fan inside that whips the hot air quickly around the interior space
The real-world tests
The best way to see any noticeable differences between food cooked in a pre-warmed air fryer and food cooked in a cool air fryer is with baking recipes. You’ll notice that anything containing eggs or yeast usually prescribes that a hot oven is used because if you don’t you are likely to encounter problems with the rise.
In my tests, I tried homemade bread, sponge cakes and cheese souffle. I placed one of each recipe in a cold air fryer drawer and then pre-heated the second drawer and placed the second identical dish in that. At the end I compared the results side by side
The results
The differences between the dishes baked in a preheated drawer and a cool drawer were minimal. In the case of the bread and the cakes it was extremely hard to spot any real difference, but the souffle placed in the preheated air fryer drawer had risen higher than the one in the cool drawer. Most notably none of the dishes cooked in the cool drawer failed. All still rose and tasted great
The conclusion
Air fryers are ovens that we all use primarily for convenience. I love the fact that it helps me get food for my family on the table in record time and I don’t think that many of us use our air fryers to be ‘cheffy’. Therefore for me, convenience trumps any small benefit of pre-heating, so I say DO NOT preheat. Just put your food in the air fryer from cold, select your temperature and time, press start and walk away!
If you are concerned about the timings of a recipe you are cooking, presuming the time is already adjusted for an air fryer simply add the time normally required for preheating (usually 3 or 4 minutes) onto the duration of the cook and you’ll be fine!
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