Duncan Bell is air frying tonight

Air fryers are quite literally the hottest gadgets of 2022 but what exactly are they?

Imagine if, instead of calling it a smartphone, Microsoft and later Apple had decided to call phones with computers and internet connectivity built in ‘outer space super communicators’. Sure, it’s a much zappier name, but people would have soon realised you couldn’t actually use them to talk to space aliens, Star Trek style. That’s pretty much what the inventor of the air fryer did, though. You might think, not unreasonably, that they ‘fry’ using ‘air’ – the clue, after all, is in the name. Clearly, they do not. How could they? It’s a physical impossibility.