Right off the bat: What we have is an Instant Vortex Pro 10-quart. It’s like a “mini-oven” that sits on the counter. It is not a ‘basket with a handle’ type air fryer, which seems to be what comes to mind first, second, and third for most people when discussing air fryers.
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OK. The food we cook in this air fryer is tasty, and gets done quickly. It preheats fast enough. We don’t have a problem with this air fryer’s mechanical function, per se.
The issue is this: We can’t get this 10-quart air fryer to cook more food at one time than a regular ol’ 5-quart basket air fryer.
More precisely: One of the advantages that I thought an air fryer had over, say, a toaster oven or a microwave is that – I thought – every cubic centimeter of air space inside the air fryer would cook food the same way thanks to the circulation of hot air. That is, we didn’t expect it to matter where, exactly, inside the air fryer the food was placed. It was expected that the cooking was ‘omni-directional’ and that the food would all come out the same regardless of placement.
In reality, where the food is placed in the air fryer matters a great deal. Want to cook some chicken fingers? Place a layer of fingers on a grated tray and place on the halfway-up ridges. Turn halfway through (also didn’t think air fryer food needed turning if a grated tray was used - whoops).
Want to cook twice as many chicken fingers? Two trays at a time? Sure, the two trays fit easily using the topmost ridges and the bottom ridges. Plenty of room in the 10-quart air fryer. But wait! The fingers in the topmost tray are burned while the ones below it are virtually uncooked. Didn’t think that was supposed to happen in an air fryer, but now we know.
The upshot is that we’re now always cooking everything one tray at a time, which makes the 10-quart air fryer have the same effective capacity as a much smaller basket air fryer. We’re not cooking for one or two. We’re regularly cooking for four or five – and that was the whole idea behind getting the bigger air fryer. I’m flummoxed that two trays placed at different levels in an air fryer would cook that differently. Again, I thought an air fryer’s air circulation avoided that uneven-cooking issue altogether. But no.
So. Given a larger-than-usual air fryer, how can we cook larger meals quicker than we can on a stovetop (our gas oven is out of order and will be for the foreseeable future)? Can we get past the one-tray-at-a-time limitation? What have we been doing wrong?