RIP the microwave meal

It was never fun, but rather what felt like a necessity when you’re out of time and out of energy.

It wasn’t a situation you planned for, you always aspired to more but on occasion life and its chaos got in the way of your plans and goals.

Our needs and circumstances haven’t changed, we very much remain in the market for quick and easy meals but we have found and adopted an appliance that offers us very little in the way of compromise.

Enter the air fryer, which has rapidly become an incredibly popular kitchen appliance for several, really valuable reasons, and as a result, it’s reshaping both how people cook and how kitchens of the future will look!

Here are 10 reasons why the air fryer is here to stay and in the process, will kill the microwave meal:

Time ROI: On busy weeknights, when traditional ovens take too long and microwaves don’t deliver the textures we enjoy, the air fryer is our saviour. It is essentially an incredibly compact convection oven that doesn’t need pre-heating and achieves convection results in half the time. Like for like, it can take a tad longer than a microwave, but the capabilities and results don’t compare.

Energy cost efficiency: Since air fryers heat a comparatively smaller space, they can reach their temperature very rapidly and retain it very efficiently, as a result, air fryers use substantially less energy. The annual running costs are around a quarter of that of running a conventional oven.

Cognitive efficiency: They're generally considered pretty user-friendly and easy to operate. But on a far more subtle level, heat transfer from the hot air is much easier for us laymen to understand, comprehend, and translate into our cooking habits over having to decode the potency of microwaves. This subtle but important difference makes utilising air fryers more intuitive for more people.

Controlled cooking: Just like a microwave, air fryers operate with a countdown timer and the cooking elements switch off once the time is reached. This creates a valuable safety feature that ovens don’t offer, making it easier for younger people to feed themselves with less supervision.

Safety: Cheerio to microwave explosions or the very real possibility that you might burn yourself when dealing with the oven.

Reliability: Once you know your appliance, you can reliably recreate results again and again. This might not sound like a distinct advantage over other appliances. However, we can’t forget the variability of heat distribution when foods are heated in the microwave, or our need to focus on the oven to achieve the same level of repeatability.

Healthier Fried Food: This has been the featured selling point as this appliance enters the mainstream. Air fryers use very little, significantly less, oil than frying, making us feel less guilty about eating fattier foods whilst allowing us to achieve the crispy, fried texture we all love.

Portion control: As they have a much smaller capacity than an oven, it nudges the user to cook smaller quantities of food for the same occasion, simultaneously reducing overeating and the creation of leftovers. It’s regularly cited as a great solution for cooking single portions versus grabbing a ready meal, which inherently causes you to overshoot your daily amounts of fat, salt or sugar.

Versatility: While they're great for mimicking fried foods, air fryers can roast and dehydrate vegetables, bake biscuits and loaves, pressure cook your favourite stews and soups, and even reheat leftovers with a crispy finish. The microwave is regularly billed as versatile, but this has never translated into an everyday reality for people.

Accomplishment: it’s easy to access and achieve success for less confident cooks, and even for those who are frequent and confident cooks, smugness is easier to achieve allround. Nothing is more satisfying than bringing a meal together, with no compromise in results, in less time with less concentration.

The ease and quality of results from air fryers, merging the crispness of convection with the momentum of the microwave, is lowering the barriers to home cooking in a hurry. They excel at cooking proteins like fish or chicken breasts and roasting vegetables, making healthier choices easier to access on those nights when you’re strapped for time and energy, and when a sloppy processed ready meal in the microwave would have been the guilty go-to.

It’s obviously important to note that microwaves themselves are not inherently unhealthy, however, they have regularly led to our drift towards ultra-processed pre-packaged meals that are often high in fat, sodium and preservatives. The air fryer well and truly invites us to assign the microwave meal to history.

Spring 2024