What are the disadvantages of an air fryer?

It goes without saying we’re completely obsessed with our own air fryer – but even we are not so enamored we can’t admit to a few weak points. The air fryer works so well for so many things – but its not a one stop tool. Here are some of the drawbacks to the air fryer.

Battered or wet items won’t cook that well

Think freshly battered onion rings or wet donut batter – these items that work so well in a deep fat fryer – well they won’t work so well in the air fryer. The deep fat fryer suspends everything in a bath of boiling hot oil – there’s nothing to stick to.

In the hard basket of the air fryer, you’ll find anything wet will simply stick to the bottom of the basket. You can work around some of this with cooking sprays, but really wet items just won’t work.

Leaner foods perform worse

In our experience leaner foods don’t work quite as well as those that are higher in fat content. Take for example a very lean turkey burger. Under the hot rapid heat of the air fryer it tends to dry out quite quickly.

Limited output

While air fryer sizes vary, none is really capable of pushing out huge amounts of food in one go. If you’re feeding a large family you’ll want to work in batches or across multiple fryers simultaneously. This means a lot of people resort to…

Overcrowding

If you put too much food in the air fryer at once the results will be sub-optimal. The air fryer works best with a single later of uncrowded food. That allows the hot circulating air to crisp all sides of your food. If you start stacking French fries or chicken wings atop each other, you’re really going to limit the crispiness of the finale product.

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These are the few disadvantages we could think of. Truthfully there aren’t that many.