Air fryers exploit the principle of convection heating other than using a fan. But what is convection heating?
In order to understand how air fryers can cook your food without using oil and provide that crispy layer that tastes so good, it could be useful to understand how they work.
For this reason, we thought of providing you with information about what is convection heating and how air fryers exploit it.
Key Takeaways
- Convection heaters need a fan to work. However, they are optimized to make the cooking process faster.
- Because of the smaller cooking chamber, the food cooks evenly and faster.
- Convection Heating Air Fryers make a lot of noise.
Convection Heating: Explained!
Physics allows for three ways of heating things: conduction, radiation, and convection.
We have conduction when something gets hot because it comes into contact with something hot (as you may know, heat goes from warmer objects to colder, and that’s how cold things get warm when they are in contact with something warmer). But this is not how air fryers work.
Radiation is how our sun heats our planet: sun rays radiate our planet and bring the heat with them. But this is not how air fryers work.
Air fryers exploit the convection system.
We have this heating any time we have some air getting hot because it comes into contact with a hot surface, and this hot air is blown into a space, in the case of air fryers, the cooking chamber.
Of course, convection heaters need a fan to work: fans blow air into the chamber. Just like ovens, air fryers have their fans. However, they are optimized to make the cooking process faster.
Air fryers’ fans speed faster than traditional ovens’; this, united with the higher temperature and a smaller cooking chamber, provides the fastest cooking process.
Advantages Of Convection Heating
Convection heating has some characteristics that we can exploit during the cooking processes to obtain the best advantages:
- With this kind of heating, the temperature of the chamber rises gradually but quickly.
- The chamber, especially because it is so small, is heated uniformly. Every service of the food receives the same amount of heat.
- This kind of heating is particularly efficient for smaller spaces. That’s why it is efficiently exploited in air fryers.
Disadvantages of Convection Heating
The only con we can highlight this type of heating in air fryers is their noise.
Because they have fans (and they need to have them), they can cause some noise when the device is working. After all, your kitchen oven also makes some noise when it’s working.
Air fryers’ noise is sometimes louder than oven’s because the device is smaller, but it works even more efficiently.
However, because air fryers are so small, you can place them in another room, and since you don’t have to check the cooking so often, this is a convenient solution.
You can also pay attention always to cleaning the cooking chamber carefully: sometimes noise is caused by small pieces jumping all over and pushed by the flow of air pushed in by the fans.
Conclusion
If there is one device where convection heating can be exploited efficiently, then it is an air fryer.
We hope now you have understood what is Convection Heating and understand how it works in an air fryer.
FAQ’s
When should you use a convection oven?
It would help if you used a convection oven in American cooking only when the recipe requires it or calls for it.
Are convection ovens better than air fryers?
Convections cook food faster and help in achieving an even crispy layer which enhances the taste of the food.
How is an air fryer different from a convection air fryer?
The basic difference between the two is that of size. Air fryers are smaller, whereas convection ovens are bigger in size and can cook more quantities of food.
Amit Gupta is the founder of National Planning Cycles, a company that helps startups, individuals, and small businesses with their financial planning. He has a vast amount of experience in the finance sector, having managed Google Play accounts for some of the world’s most successful unicorns. Amit is an expert in his field, and he uses his knowledge to help others achieve their individual goals.