I feel like I’ve joined the 21st century

I’ve got an air fryer

My kitchen. The work on paper is by Australian artist, Pat Harry.

Since the dawning of the Air Fryer Era I’ve felt very conflicted.

Part of me can’t bear to be left out of a fad and I was also attracted by the idea of not heating my whole oven to warm one croissant.

Added to that my very good friend Tony Howard – probably the best cook I know – is mad about his and I’ve eaten a whole meal he cooked in it, which was proper lovely.

So what stopped me? They are absolutely hideous.

Who decided they had to look like alien aircraft? Like a 1980s set designer’s idea of how people will cook in 2024. Not in a good way.

Like a Danny DeVito Tesla.

There is no way I could have one of those mofos squatting on my kitchen bench.

I’m very short on countertop in general – and the only place it could go is on the back wall side. This area is very carefully curated (with all the pretension that word implies) because it’s the only part of the kitchen visible from the adjacent sitting room.

How my riff works is that you can’t tell that the kitchen end of the space is a kitchen until you’re actually in there. You can’t see it from any of the seats in the sitting room and that’s just how I want it. Cunning.

So I don’t want the Rumpelstiltskin of cooking gadgets shouting LOOK! A KITCHEN! to people in fashionable outfits sipping chic drinks on my Barcelona chair.

But now I finally have one because I was rehearsing all these arguments with a pal who’s mad about his air fryer and the next day he dropped round with his spare one.

And this is something I’ve observed with air fryer consumers. They rarely stop at the one. Having had this thing for a few days, I can see why. I know exactly what features I would look not to have if I bought one myself.

I would want one which you could turn off when you wanted to – rather than having to wait for the timer to finish. I would also like to lose the harsh ticking you are subjected to for the entire run.

Another thing to look out for would be a drawer big enough for a fully-grown chicken. I would have to take a tape measure with me to the shops to find a chicken I could fit into this.

And then once I’d roasted it in there – how would I make gravy, with no metal roasting tin of glorious crusty bits to deglaze?

So far I’ve made three things in my air fryer – which I have to say is the most brilliantly named product ever to launch, because it has nothing to do with frying. It’s actually a very small (and plastic-y smelling) fan oven, but the name ‘air fryer’ makes you feel like you’re about to make the world’s first diet chips.

Back to my first air frying forays. First, I cooked some bacon, which was easy and didn’t splatter every surface in the kitchen with a mist of aerial fat. I would do that again.

Last night I baked some chicken drumsticks, which I’d marinated all day and then done a panko breadcrumb, lemon zest crust jiggy on.

I followed a recipe from the dedicated air fryer section on the BBC Good Food site (where I get most recipes these days) for the timings, but they came out slightly undercooked according to those instructions and then a bit dry after another 10 minutes of loud ticking.

Today I’ve made banana bread, from another BBC air fryer recipe, which involved first purchasing a lilliputian cake tin.

I started making it 5.10pm this afternoon and here at 8.43pm it’s still not cooked through. I’ve had it upside down for another 30 minutes to try and remedy the very soggy bottom, but it’s still raw in the middle, so back in again it is.

Can that really be a saving on using a normal oven?

So much nicer without the Danny DeVito of kitchen appliances.

So, it’s safe to say, I’m not convinced yet that air fryer life is for me, although I can see that if you are single and heat up a lot of ready meals, it would give a more satisfying result than a microwave – while saving oven costs.

But I cook everything from scratch and I just don’t think at this stage of life I can be bothered to learn a whole new way of making everything I already know how to do. I can now understand why there are so many of the things for sale on Facebook marketplace.

However, there is one good thing I’ve discovered about the ugly little object. It fits neatly in my real oven, so at least I can keep it out of sight, until next time I want to cook some bacon.

Do you love your air fryer? Please tell me why and what I should make.

PS It’s now 9.23pm and the cake still isn’t cooked in the middle. We are eating the edges.