If you’re looking for a way to get crispy fries without the greasy oil bath, Rosewill’s Air Fryer is a great option. It’s basically a high-powered convection oven that circulates the heat around all sides of the food so that your food can get crispy without the need for oil. You can purchase Rosewill’s Air Fryer today for $109.99!
Although it’s called an Air Fryer, it can perform a number of tasks, including frying, grilling, roasting, and baking. Apparently, you can bake a cake in there, although I didn’t get too fancy in my testing.
There is a heating element at the top of the unit with a fan above that circulates the heat all around the fryer basket below. The fryer basket is a round basket with holes on all sides that allows the heat to get where it’s needed, into the food! The fryer basket is attached to a tray that catches any oil or debris that falls from the food while cooking. The frying tray is attached to the frying basket so you can carry the basket without fear of dripping all over your kitchen and there’s a button on the handle of the frying basket that detaches the tray beneath for cleaning. Both the frying basket and frying tray are dishwasher safe.
The temperature can be set between 170 and 400 degrees Fahrenheit, while the timer can be set for up to 30 minutes. It has 7 cooking presets, including Fries, Chicken, Steak, Shrimp, Meat, Cake, and Fish. The presets, temperature, and timer can all be set on the touch sensitive LCD screen on the front of the unit. When you’re cooking pre-frozen foods like French fries and tater tots, you don’t need to add any additional oil during cooking and they’ll come out nice and crispy. But if you’re making homemade fries, you’ll want to at least spray some oil on the fries to allow for crisping during the cooking process.
The Air Fryer I reviewed was the 3.3-quart capacity Air Fryer that has a 1400-Watt power output. It’s about 14” high by 12” wide by 13” deep and weighs about 10.5 pounds. I found the 3.3-quart capacity to be good for around 2-4 people depending on serving size. I cooked both frozen fries and frozen potato pancakes in my testing, both of which came out well, but not as I had expected. You do have to shake the basket half-way through cooking or you’ll get unevenly cooked food. I had hoped that the fries and tater tots would come out tasting as though they had been deep-fried, but I was a little disappointed.
I found that fries and tater tots cooked in the Air Fryer taste similar to oven baked fries, but without the need to add cooking spray. It’s definitely a convenient way to cook fries or another side dish, but I can’t imagine using the Air Fryer as a replacement for my full-sized oven or grill. It’s fairly large size also potentially limits its user base, since how many people have room to store something like this for semi-frequent use? During testing, we kept it in the basement and it was definitely not fun dragging it up to the kitchen each time we wanted to use it.
If you’re looking for fries that taste deep-fried, you’ll actually have to deep-fry them. But if you’re looking for an easy way to get fries crispy without adding additional fat, then Rosewill’s Air Fryer is a great way to go. It’s a nice alternative to using a conventional oven and cooking spray that adds extra fat.
You can purchase the Rosewill Air Fryer from Amazon or NewEgg!
Source: The Rosewill Air Fryer was a manufacturer supplied review unit.
What I Like: Nice, straight forward LCD screen; Powerful and easy to use; Makes nice, crispy fries; Many different functions.
What Needs Improvement: It’s a rather large and cumbersome unit; Doesn’t exactly replace a deep-fryer.