Trying Dry Frying Had Me Crying!

Bit of an exaggeration for a snappy title but either way I wasn't that impressed with it!

In February I bought this dry fryer for £48 on Amazon and I was excited to see what it could do. After 6 months of using it I can tell you...not that much! I mean, it's great for the usual suspects of roast potatoes, chips, roast vegetables etc but it's nowhere near as versatile as they'd have you believe.

It makes lovely crispy roast potatoes and it saves space in the oven if you're making a Sunday dinner, which is really useful. For the first few weeks we had roast potatoes often along with roast parsnips, chips and sweet potato wedges. It's great that you can use a tiny amount of oil to cook them but you can also get the same effect by using spray oil in a regular oven.

Roast Parsnips.

Potato Wedges.

You can leave things roasting in the oven for a good 15 minutes, flip them and leave them another 15 minutes. With a dry fryer you have to attend to them more often, roast potatoes need jostling every 5 minutes to make sure they cook evenly. When you've got several other components of a meal to manage it's a bit of a hassle.

So, I'd tried all the basics but I wanted to get more from my dry fryer so I googled some recipes for alternative dry fryer ideas. I started off with Dry Fryer Churros.

They don't look too bad, if a little weird. But they were full of air instead of a solid thing. more like the texture of an eclair. Don't get me wrong, we ate them (we had chocolate sauce to dip them in afterall) but they weren't churros. This recipe had a thumbs down from me!

JD had some success making naan breads in the dry fryer. We usually make them in the oven but JD made some lovely, fluffy naans to go with our curry. They were nicer than our usual ones but because of the small size of the dry fryer basket they took a lot longer to make. We also had some dry fryer grilled corn on the cob which was lovely with an almost chargrilled flavour. It was easy to prepare and didn't have to be attended to much during the cooking process.

Overall I'm disappointed with the dry fryer. I don't think I'll be keeping it. It makes lovely roast potatoes but it doesn't do enough to earn counter space in my kitchen. I like appliances that make cooking easier and more varied rather than more difficult. I wish I'd tested more recipes with it but based on the outcome of a few I did try I just wasn't into it. It's sat on my counter gathering dust and so it has to go!