Professional Chefs Need To Chill With The Air Fryer Hate

It's been a while since a kitchen product landed on the market with the sheer trendiness of the air fryer. It's been heavily on the rise since 2017, but the last few years have seen a massive uptick, due in part to consumers seeking out its ease of use during the coronavirus pandemic. (For context, Americans spent almost $1 billion on air fryers in 2022 alone.) Its popularity is arguably within good reason. The air fryer's versatility can't be overstated — after all, it's a device that can cook chicken wings as easily as it can salmon. Its convenience factor can't be overlooked, either: All you have to do is press a few buttons and let it get to work.

Despite this, professional chefs and culinary experts alike seem to hate the thing. You don't have to look far to find examples, either: Pretty much every YouTube cooking video involving a chef and an air fryer is riddled with disdain. "It's just a convection oven," they whinge.

Among those detractors is professional YouTube chef Brian Lagerstrom. "Air fryers are kinda dumb," says Lagerstrom in one video, adding that "a stove-oven combination is by far your best option." (Okay then, let's just pop food in the easily portable convection oven we all definitely own.)

Though chefs love to act like air fryers aren't revolutionary because something similar already exists, they clearly have value in the commercial market — one that chefs either aren't considering or don't want to acknowledge. Simply put, their ease of use far exceeds anything else readily available for that purpose.

It's true that convenience-cooking products, or simply convenience-oriented food products, can sometimes run so far aground that they become something totally unrecognizable. (For example, what many Americans think of as "parmesan cheese" bears about as much resemblance to actual Parmigiano as it does to a freshly-caught sockeye salmon.) But the very valid importance of convenience to the average person can't be overstated.

Is fried chicken cooked in an air fryer quite as good as fried chicken made using the traditional deep-frying method of submerging it in oil? Definitely not. But it's very close to being as good while also being worlds easier (and faster!) to make. Instead of watching the oil to make sure your chicken doesn't burn, you just set a timer and do something else. Better yet, you don't need to worry about disposing of large amounts of cooking oil afterward. If you've just gotten off a hard day of work, it's a godsend.

Moreover, there are certain things air fryers are legitimately better at than anything else. Reheating Popeye's chicken is a fool's endeavor — unless you own an air fryer, in which case it becomes easy and has virtually no discernible drop in quality. That's a bit harder to pull off, logistically, in a toaster oven than it is in something with a basket set-up clearly designed for that purpose.

It's not clear if a lot of chefs — particularly those who regularly work with higher-end foods — are even really familiar with the idea or importance of convenience as a consideration for dinner prep. Then again, it's not hard to see why. When you're entrenched in restaurant culture and your days are filled with inventive and time-consuming haute cuisine practices, you can lose sight of the fact that the majority of people have neither the time nor energy to spend two hours preparing a fine meal every night. Your choices are often limited if you still want to save money and cook at home, and air fryers tremendously expand the range of those options.

The particular disdain so many chefs have for the existence of the air fryer seems to spring from resentment. Some of this is an understandable, if misguided, loyalty to the myth of fidelity in original recipes and practices — as if food isn't constantly undergoing evolution and experimentation. But some of it also likely comes from the simple fact that a product like an air fryer makes foods that were previously only available in restaurants (or through intensive at-home labor) that are now easily accessible for consumers in their own kitchens. Though their ire might be misplaced, chefs understandably don't like feeling obsolete.

Chefs don't often do this with a lot of other products that, while commercially available, don't have an air fryer's general utility. Take sous vide machines, which cook vacuum-sealed items like salmon using water immersion at a precise temperature. You can buy sous vide machines on Amazon, and while they're more popular than they used to be, they haven't caught on like air fryers.

This goes back to the original question: Why do chefs criticize air fryers but not the sous vide machine, which celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal is well known for pushing, among others? The answer is pretty clear-cut — it's probably because chefs who praise sous vide machines might very well use them in their restaurants. (To be fair, it's a unique method of cooking you can't recreate through other means, so it triggers the sense of culinary invention valued by most chefs.) But restaurants don't use air fryers, so chefs look down on them the same way they do microwaves, despite the fact both products have a clear reason to exist.

Of course, chefs should definitely be respected for what they do; nothing beats a high-quality restaurant meal and a fine-dining experience. But until they understand how convenience is the overriding factor for most home consumers (and how there's absolutely nothing wrong with that!), they'll continue to come off as elitist at worst, and out of touch at best. Maybe they'll never use an air fryer, but to act like there's no reason for anyone to do so is the height of true disconnect.