We've all spent the last few years thinking air fryers are god's gift to the kitchen, but what if that was actually a myth?
According to the UK's foremost money-saving guru, Martin Lewis, while the air fryer might be a great choice for some types of cooking, if you've been telling yourself it's always cheaper than using a regular oven, you might need to think again.
Lewis explained on a recent episode of The Martin Lewis podcast that working out what's cheaper between an air fryer, a microwave and an oven can actually be really complicated - which might not be what you were hoping to hear!
It all comes down to how these different tools heat things up. Lewis explained that a microwave is constantly generating heat in the whole time it's on, whereas a traditional oven gets the whole of its interior to one temperature and then tops things up occasionally to keep it hot.
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That means that for long cook times, an oven can be more efficient - but where does that leave us for air frying?
Well, that's even more complicated, because Lewis explained that those who really want to maximize their efficiency if bills are a concern should look into their appliances actual watt levels.
This gets a little tricky quickly. As Lewis put it: "General equation is, find the wattage of an item, then work out how many kilowatts or what fraction of a kilowatt it's using, then multiply that by 34p per hour of use. The problem with the equation for heating equipment is an oven is going to be about 2,000W."
So, he said: "If you had a 1,000W microwave and you put it on for 10 minutes, one KWH for a sixth of an hour, a sixth of 34p is about 6p, shall we say? So it’s 6p turning the microwave on for that amount of time. So yes, it’s a very useful equation."
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If you want to break it down to a really simple concept, though, a rule that you can work with, it's probably this: cooking a small meal or food for one person is likely to be more efficient with an air fryer.
However, cooking larger amounts, where you might have to leave the air fryer on for ages or do multiple batches, would probably better be done in an oven, where more than one thing can cook at the same time.