More and more people are convinced of the many advantages of a deep fryer without oil and are equipping their kitchen with a hot air deep fryer.
Therefore, the question of whether you have to preheat an air fryer is becoming more and more common.
Our answer is: This is usually not necessary, but can be easily implemented if required.
How do you preheat an air fryer?
Some hot air fryers have a special preheat function. If your device has it, you can use this feature and don’t have to worry about it.
If your model doesn’t have a preheat function, you can simply set your target temperature and let the appliance heat up for 2-5 minutes before adding your food. Usually, 3 minutes are enough.
However, this heating-up time should not be too long, since hot air fryers can heat up to high temperatures within a few minutes.
When should you preheat an air fryer?
If the recipe you are cooking from explicitly calls for preheating, then you should do so for the best results.
Preheating can also always be useful if you want the food to be crispy on the outside. Food that has already been pre-cooked in particular sometimes benefits from pre-heating, giving it a delicious and crispy outside.
For example, frozen fries usually get nice and crispy on the outside if you preheat the device before you put the fries in the fryer.
But even a nice steak benefits from a preheated hot air fryer if you want it to be nice and crispy on the outside and medium or rare on the inside.
When should you not preheat an air fryer?
When cooking large and raw foods, you should generally avoid preheating. Otherwise, there is a risk that the outside will be nice and crispy but the inside of the food is not quite done yet.
If you use baking paper in the air fryer, you should avoid preheating. Otherwise, the paper could reach the heating coil through the circulating air and burn there.
If you want to preheat despite using baking paper, then you should only push the cooking basket with the baking paper and the food into the fryer after the preheating phase.
Conclusion
Our practice has shown that preheating is rarely necessary. We also found that it doesn’t make much of a difference whether we preheat or not.
But that may vary from model to model. As always, it can be useful to simply experiment a little with the device. This is exactly what makes a hot air fryer stand out, among other things.