From transforming your vegetables into a crispy delight and giving your leftover pizza a new lease of life to baking entire cakes and preparing full roast dinners, the air fryer seems to be the jack-of-all-trades in the kitchen.
This beloved gadget offers a speedier and more energy-efficient method of cooking compared to the traditional oven.
Plus, it’s a far more convenient option for frying, allowing you to simply toss food items into the basket and go about your day, rather than being tethered to a sizzling frying pan.
However, it appears there is one common breakfast item that should never find its way into an air fryer – and it all boils down to fat content.
Dietitian Brenda Peralta has shared a word of caution with anyone who cooks bacon in their air fryer.
“It is a fatty food, and when it is cooked in an air fryer, the fat can drip down and cause smoke or splatter,” she told Yahoo.
“A bacon strip is a small and delicate food, and it can be difficult to flip or remove from the air fryer basket without breaking it.”
The problem of size also comes into play, particularly when serving multiple people, as Brenda further noted: “The air fryer basket may not be large enough to accommodate a large quantity of bacon.
“This can make it difficult to cook a lot of bacon at once, which can be inconvenient if you are cooking for a group,” reports the Daily Record.
She concludes: “This can make the bacon difficult to cook evenly, and it can also produce a lot of smoke and odours.”
Air fryers, known for crisping up food by circulating hot air with minimal fat or oil, might not be the best choice for bacon due to its high-fat content.
Cooking bacon in an air fryer can result in all the fat rendering out without a proper escape route.
The oven emerges as the superior cooking method for bacon since it doesn’t require additional butter or oil.
For those cooking in smaller batches, pan-frying offers a swift alternative.
Nevertheless, for die-hard air fryer enthusiasts, BBC Good Food suggests placing a maximum of three back bacon rashers or six streaky bacon pieces in a single layer and cooking them at 200C.
“Cook streaky bacon rashers for six to 10 mins, just-cooked bacon will take six mins, but crispier bacon will take nine to 10 mins,” they recommend.
Back bacon is expected to cook within four to eight minutes.