I understand that air fryer spins the air, while oven keeps it still. What I don’t understand is how hot air moving changes the way the food is cooked? Like is air fryer just faster? Whenever I eat food from air fryer it has a completely different quality than from the oven.
Plus, a lot of ovens have a fan inside. Wouldn’t it spin the air as well?
In: Physics
Air fryers can get to higher temps faster. They can get hotter faster. Less preheat time.
Air fryers not only move the air around but also cycle it as in like, the steam is removed keeping the air dryer, helping it make food crispy.
And that fan in a normal oven only turns on when you set it to convection.
But yes overall, an air fryer is just a smaller convection oven
Most ovens made the last four decades do also spin the air. You can see the fan on the mode switch which you can enable or disable. Moving the air around ensures that the heat is more evenly distributed around the food rather then all coming from above or bellow. So the main difference is the size. However that is quite important as it determines how fast it heats up. Air fryers heat up much faster and will therefore give crispier texture on the food. You can get around some of this by preheating the oven but you are still going to release a lot of heat when you open the door.
Most air fryers only have one mode of operation – cook fast and on relatively high heat with hot air that removes moisture very quickly. There is some temperature adjustment but this is generally what it does. This makes it really good at fast cooking relatively small/thin food quickly and achieves some crispiness.
Ovens are typically much more flexible. Modern ones can (more or less) operate like an air fryer if it has a convection mode at high temps (>190 C or 375F). It can also operate at lower temperatures (160-170C) for baking or perhaps even lower temperatures (120-140C) to cook large things like turkeys without burning/overcooking the outside before the inside is cooked. Then it can also be used for really low temp high humidity cooking like a bain marie (in a water bath).
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