If you’ve followed any quarantine kitchen trends (hello sourdough), you probably know that air fryers are hot right now. Whether cooking or ordering takeout is more your jam, air fryers make food prep hard to mess up.
Selling like hot cakes — and making them too
Air fryers are the new cool kid in the kitchen. Their popularity has increased tenfold in the past two years, selling at a rate of around four million in the U.S. per year.
By circulating hot air, air fryers produce crispy food without the need for much oil or any oil at all depending on the recipe; the outside gets a yummy crunch, while the inside stays juicy. Unlike the hot mess of a deep fryer or frying pans, they’re tidy appliances that take up very little counterspace, and produce the same or arguably better results if you’re trying to eat healthier. They also won’t smoke up your apartment like an old-school oven.
Now with two baskets to play with compared to the standard one, the new Ninja® Foodi® with DualZone™ Technology has upped the ante. Your frying pan, oven, and toaster will be blown away by the competition.
Multitasking comes to the kitchen
Image: Shark Ninja
You might be great at multitasking at work, but fully cooking one dish without burning the other requires coordinating gadgets, gizmos, and timers. Suddenly scheduling a remote conference call with your entire team seems easy by comparison.
For efficiency, the Ninja® Foodi® with DualZone™ Technology has twin baskets that work independently. Meaning you can cook two different dishes, two different ways in one appliance. While one basket is humming away air-frying, the other might be slowly air-broiling. All of the six cooking styles — air fry, air broil, roast, bake, reheat, and dehydrate — can be used simultaneously.
Each basket has its own dedicated timer which coordinates for a Smart Finish. For example, a dish that takes 10 minutes to cook and one that takes 30 minutes will be ready to hit your plate piping hot at the exact same time. (If you’re curious how that works, the dish that takes less time to cook is in a holding pattern, while the other one counts down. Then they start cooking together for the final stretch.)
Speeding up meal prep
When you’re juggling work and cooking, speed matters. In the time you wait for a standard oven to preheat, you might have already ordered delivery online — and received it. By contrast, the roomy, two-basket Foodi can accommodate eight quarts of food, which is enough for a family-sized meal.
Circulating hot air produces even heat and cooks faster, which is why air fryers have gained major traction. They may be trendy now, but they’re like the slow cooker: it in for the long haul.