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Full size gas and electric ovensare really good at heating the kitchen and often the whole house depending on how big your space is. Turn on the large oven even for 10 minutes during a heat wave can take things from bad to worse. Cooking out with a grilledsmoker or pizza oven is a little better, but it stands outside in temperatures of 90 degrees above a hot grill it’s still insidious.
A heat wave requires creative thinking to keep your home cool and air fryer is my ticket to getting through these sweltering summer spells without starving. The best part? A good quality air fryer can be taken only $50.
An air fryer cooks quickly and uses less energy than an oven or grill. I’ve found that cooking with an air fryer doesn’t raise the temperature in my home, while turning on the oven – even just to preheat – can cause a noticeable rise.
Modern air fryers are everything they want to be, especially when it’s hot outside.
So much so that I almost gave up oven and even my grill during hot summer days and is a complete fryer. My sanity and my monthly energy bill are better for it.
To see if air fryers really are the best heatwave cooking device, I compared the amount that cooking with an air fryer would raise the temperature in my kitchen versus using a full-size wall oven.
How I tested the heat output of an air fryer versus a wall oven
The air fryer makes juicy chicken legs in less than 20 minutes.
To find out the real-world differences, I roasted chicken legs in my KitchenAid wall oven (less than 10 years old) and Dreo 4-quart deep fryer, according to two popular recipes from a well-known cooking site. I tested the temperature before, during and after to see what difference each machine made.
The kitchen of my Brooklyn apartment is on the small side, but it’s not closed off and opens up to the rest of the apartment. I kept the windows closed for the test, though it’s worth noting that recent studies cooking outdoors with natural gas in a closed kitchen can be a health risk.
I’m finding less and less reason to turn on the big oven lately.
The standard oven recipe called for the chicken to be baked at 375 degrees for 30 minutes in the oven. Because of its smaller chamber, the air fryer recipe only requires 20 minutes of cooking at the same temperature. A deep fryer only takes about a minute to reach temperature, while an oven takes more than five.
The ambient thermometer is all I needed to test how much hotter a gas oven can make a kitchen.
I placed a standard room thermometer in the middle of the kitchen — about 5 feet from the stove — at counter height. I counted before the oven or fryer was turned on. I took another reading halfway through the cooking time and a final reading at the end of the cooking time. Between the two sessions, I waited for the kitchen to return to resting temperature before starting the next one.
The large oven made my kitchen 12 degrees hotter than the deep fryer
Ovens have a larger capacity than air fryers, but it’s still rarely worth heating the house in the summer.
As I suspected, my oven was heating up the kitchen much more than the fryer. Halfway through the recipes (15 minutes), the oven raised the temperature of my kitchen 15 degrees from 71 F to a very hot 88 F.
After 10 minutes of air fryer cooking at 375 F, the temperature in my kitchen had risen only 5 degrees F, from 72 F to a pleasant 77 F. While you can feel the radiation from the air fryer if you stand close enough, it’s not enough to significantly change the temperature in the kitchen.
Read more: Here’s how to keep your kitchen cool (and lower your energy bill) during a heat wave
Not only did the fryer cause fewer temperature spikes, but I only needed to run it for approximately 20 minutes with a minute of preheat time. The oven took 30 minutes to bake the chicken and 6 minutes to preheat.
Using the air fryer will reduce energy bills
Even modern ovens use significantly more energy than deep fryers.
During a heat wave, your air conditioning already working hard. Heating the kitchen with your oven will only require them to work harder, using more energy to bring the room back to your desired temperature. For an air conditioner to make up the difference for a 20- or 30-minute cooking session with an oven, it may not be a complete budget saver. But spread that over time or over longer cooking sessions and using the oven during the hot months can have real fiscal implications. For more information, read my breakdown of exactly how much more does an oven cost to run than an air fryer.
What can you do in an air fryer?
Roast chicken in the deep fryer is dynamite and takes less time than in the big oven.
An air fryer can do almost any cooking job that an oven can, although air fryers are usually smaller than wall ovens, so you can’t cook as much at once.
I’ve been doing a lot with the deep fryer this year. I discovered the joy of cooking whole chickens in the air fryer, salmon fillets and even bacon cheeseburgers. The air fryer exceeds its reputation for making crispy wings and fries. You can make dinner-grade recipes in the deep fryer without breaking a sweat, literally.
They are here seven foods which I now only do in the deep fryer not only because they keep my kitchen cooler, but because the results are as good or better than the other methods. And here it is our complete guide to air fryerseveryone’s favorite new kitchen appliance.
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