THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO...Air fryers

Deep fat fryers have had their chips. Here's why air fryers are the must-have kitchen tech of 2023 - and how you can find the best one for your cooking and your kitchen

- Carrie Marshall

With the cost of living hitting everybody's pay packets and our energy bills still sitting at record highs, it's hardly surprising that air fryers have become the must-have kitchen tech of 2023. With the promise of faster, healthier and, most importantly of all, cheaper cooking they've become so popular that there's a whole genre of news stories about 'outraged' would-be air fryer buyers seeing supermarket stock go straight to eBay.

In the US, MSNBC reports that 60% of households have an air fryer - but here in the UK the figure is 30%, so there's plenty of homes with an air fryer-shaped space in their kitchen. If yours is one of them, there's never been a better time to join the air fryer frenzy - and if you choose wisely, it's an investment you'll be really glad you made.

We're all feeling the pinch of ever-increasing costs. Air fryers promise to help with that by slashing the cost of one thing we really can't live without: cooking. As a result air fryers have become exceptionally popular, and what started as a fairly niche market with the Tefal ActiFry and a couple of Philips fryers has become an entire sector featuring pretty much every appliance maker you can imagine.

That's great for would-be buyers because the intense competition means there's a huge range of products from cheap and cheerful compact fryers to very clever multi-function devices and everything in between.

But the term 'air fryer' is a misnomer, because they don't fry; they roast. An air fryer is really a very small oven with a very big fan in it, and that combination means it can heat food more quickly than a conventional oven or a normal fan oven. Because air fryer heat is so intense, the results are much closer to those of a deep fryer - and because you're not immersing your food in oil, it's a healthier way to enjoy fried food.