Turning on the wall oven heat wave Things are only going to get worse. Full size gas and electric ovenEven newer, more efficient models Heat up the kitchen Depending on the size of your space, it can heat up your entire home. During the heatwaves, you have to get creative to keep your home cool, and the air fryer is my go-to for getting through the sweltering summer months.
Cooking outdoors with a grill, smoker or fire pit is another way to keep your kitchen cool during the heatwaves, but standing outside in 90+ degree temperatures for long periods of time can be quite stressful. Hot Grill It's not a fun time for me.
Air fryers cook food faster and use less energy than ovens or grills, and while cooking in an air fryer doesn't heat up your home much, I find that just preheating your oven can raise the temperature quite a bit.
The trendy air fryer performs as expected, especially when it's hot.
I almost gave up oven And my grill Hot and humid summer day I've completely eliminated my air fryer, which has improved my mental health and my monthly utility bills.
To see if the air fryer really is the ultimate heatwave cooking device, we compared the amount of heat increase in our kitchen when cooking in an air fryer versus using a full-sized wall oven.
How We Tested the Heat Output of Air Fryers and Wall Ovens
Using an air fryer, you can have juicy chicken thighs in under 20 minutes.
To see the real difference, I roasted chicken thighs using two popular recipes from a popular cooking site in a KitchenAid wall oven (less than 10 years old) and a 4-quart Dreo air fryer, testing temperatures before, during, and after cooking to see how much of a difference each machine could make.
The kitchen in my Brooklyn apartment is small, but it's not enclosed and is connected to the rest of the apartment. I kept the window closed during testing, Recent Research Cooking with natural gas in an enclosed kitchen can pose health risks.
There are fewer and fewer reasons to use a big oven these days.
A standard oven recipe calls for roasting the chicken in the oven at 375 degrees for 30 minutes. An air fryer recipe only requires cooking it at the same temperature for 20 minutes because the chamber is smaller. It only takes about a minute to come up to temperature in the air fryer, whereas an oven takes more than five minutes.
All you need to test how hot your gas oven can make your kitchen is an ambient thermometer.
I placed a standard ambient thermometer at counter level in the middle of my kitchen, about 5 feet away from the stove. I took the temperature before turning on the oven or air fryer. I took another reading halfway through the cook time, and a final reading at the end of the cook time. Between readings, I waited for the kitchen to return to normal temperature before starting the next measurement.
The large oven made the kitchen 12 degrees hotter than the air fryer.
Although ovens have a larger capacity than air fryers, they're still hardly worth heating up your house in the summer.
As expected, the oven made my kitchen much hotter than the air fryer did: halfway through the recipe (15 minutes in), the oven raised the temperature in my kitchen by 15 degrees, from 71° to 88°, making it too hot.
After cooking for 10 minutes with the air fryer set at 375 degrees F, the temperature in my kitchen only increased by 5 degrees F, from 72 degrees F to a comfortable 77 degrees F. You can feel the heat coming from the air fryer if you stand close enough, but it's not enough to drastically change the temperature in my kitchen.
read more: How to keep your kitchen cool (and save money on your energy bill) during the heatwaves
Not only does the air fryer have fewer temperature spikes, but it also takes a minute to preheat, so I only had to run it for about 20 minutes.The oven took 30 minutes to cook the chicken and 6 minutes to preheat.
Using an air fryer can help you save money on your electricity bill
Even modern ovens use much more energy than air fryers.
During a heat wave, Air conditioning Your oven is already working hard. If you use it to heat up your kitchen, it's making it work even harder. It's using more energy to bring the room back to the temperature you want. If you're just making up for the lack of air conditioning for one 20- or 30-minute cook in the oven, it might not be enough to strain your budget. But if you spread that out over time or into longer cooks, and use your oven during hot weather, it could really have a financial impact. For more on this, read our breakdown of exactly how to use your oven. How much more expensive is an oven to run than an air fryer?.
What can you make in an air fryer?
Air fryer roasted chicken tastes amazing and takes less time than baking it in a big oven.
An air fryer can cook almost everything an oven can, but because air fryers are usually smaller than a wall oven, they can only cook as much at a time.
I've been using my air fryer a lot this year and have really discovered the joy of cooking. Whole chicken In an air fryer, Salmon fillet And more Bacon cheeseburger. Air fryers go far beyond their reputation for cooking up crispy chicken wings and fries: You can make dinner-party-level recipes in your air fryer without literally breaking a sweat.
here 7 Foods Now I only cook in an air fryer, not only because it keeps my kitchen cooler, but also because the results are just as good or better than any other method. The Complete Guide to Air Fryerseveryone's favorite new kitchen appliance.
