Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this product, free of charge, from Fritaire, for review purposes on this blog. No other compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it. All opinions are my own
All this week I will be bringing you unique items for back to school aimed at high schoolers and college kids!
This is what I would consider one of the big purchases for your kid for college. It's a kitchen appliance and it can do so much in a very little space. It's also something that you might want to consider to replace your current air fryer at home,since you got one less kid you'll be cooking for,if you're darling is headed off to a dorm or apartment.
The Fritaire Air Fryer takes dorm cooking beyond instant noodles and microwaved snack foods. Its 1500W halogen heating system and vortex convection technology deliver crispy, evenly cooked meals, while the self-cleaning glass bowl makes cleanup fast and easy, perfect for students with limited kitchen space. And it comes in seven different colors to match their space perfectly!
But let's take a look at the individual functions of the Fritaire!
At its heart, it is an air fryer. And that means you can substitute using it for a regular oven for oil-less frying and baking. Now obviously it is recommended to put a little bit of olive oil spray on some items, for crispier crust but technically you don't have to have that on there. So once we got the air fryer set up we ran a simple test run to make sure everything was working okay bye installing the wire shelf into the base and cooking a breakfast mini pizza. 380° for 8 minutes and it was perfectly done. Your student could literally have a filling breakfast finished by the time they're ready to walk out the door after getting dressed. In hindsight my only suggestion on these is to have a parchment paper for under so that you still get the crispy under as the crisper plate included with the frozen pizza did not really work for air frying. The shelf is perfect for doing things like chicken nuggets, meats, burritos, and other items that need to be on something. You could use the silicone holder, as well, with or without the shelf.
Let's look at a couple of the features before we continue. As you can see,your control panel panel is on the top of the unit. This is probably quite different from the air fryer you have at home currently as most of them have a basket that pull out, not a top that lives off. So having said that you do have to make sure that you have somewhere to put the top down that's not going to cause damage while it's hot. In our case we have a heat safe place mat, that we normally have under our other air fryer so we just left it underneath this one. By pulling the air fryer to the front that gives me room to put the top behind it while still on the mat, making it easier to remove the food. So that is something you're going to have to think about if you're putting it in a dorm room.
The control panel is much simplified from the average home air fryer. Instead of having say eight choices for temperature, you have one touch options of Meat, Fish, Fries, Chicken, Baking and Dehydrate. Then you can just adjust the time and temperature by one main control. It's much easier to use than are large air fryer, per Miss Grace. Fritaire has taken what most people use air fryers for and made the panel for them. As long as you have it situated where you can see the top, then having the panel on top is not an issue. And at a dorm room you definitely want to have room around it for airflow so it shouldn't be used say in a cabinet it needs to be on an open counter.
Let's just talk about the tumbling basket for a minute. OMG, this little basket is going to change the way your potatoes come out of the air fryer. PERIOD. Did I mention it's an included item at no extra cost? All you have to do is add some olive oil to your potatoes, with or without some herbs, throw them in the basket, set it on to the rotisserie holder slots, and air fry life normal. But you get the best tasting potatoes, because they are rotated, every inch of potato gets baked. In the picture above, you see that we did potato and carrot chunks. Now I technically should have started the carrots before the potatoes, but Miss Grace actually likes hers barely cooked so it was actually perfect for her. There was literally no potatoes left after the second dinner. We literally were walking into the kitchen to snack on them, they were that great! Then later during the week, we tried sweet potato fries in the tumbling basket, and they were just as good!
Now let's talk about that rotisserie. It will change how you cook during the summer! If you thought you use your air fryer a lot during the summer, you're going to realize you're going to use it every day thanks to the rotisserie! It is so easy to rotisserie a chicken, a pork loin, even a medium sized roast! Whatever you want to put on a rotisserie, that will fit, you can cook it! I do want to say if you're going to put a chunk of meat on there, make sure that you have cooking twine because you will need it. The rotisserie pole does not have any type of barbs on it to hold on to the meat in the middle, so you need to make sure your meat is secured to the pole the other twine, as you'll see in the video below I could have had mine a little bit tighter but it still held on. There are two included side rotisserie hooks that help keep your meat on the rotisserie spit at the end and do go into your meat. I am going to be honest with you that because the rotisserie spit is not sharp at both ends it is a little harder to get through a solid chunk of meat, so you may want to keep that in mind. In fact my only complaint about the Fritaire is putting the rotisserie screws in to the end hooks, to keep them in place,as it can be a little difficult if your hands are wet. My recommendation is to have somebody else do it for you or to make sure you have dry hands. In my case using a pork loin roast it was actually already cut down the middle so wrapping it around the spit with the twine was actually quite easy. The spit will only hook in one direction on the side of the bowl correctly so it's actually pretty easy to put on. You then attach the rotisserie motor to the side of the glass bowl after adding in 4 AA batteries, that are not included, and opening the rotisserie flap. It's that simple. It's pretty cool to watch your meet on the rotisserie on your counter.
See what I mean? And let me tell you about the smell - I wish we had smellovision, because it was absolute heaven, and drove the two cats and the dog absolutely crazy. They literally sat in the kitchen and we're watching the meat turn!
Dehydrating meat and fruits are just as simple! You have your choice of putting them on the rotisserie or on the air stand. We actually found that the small air stand that I already had that for use in our large air fryer, fit this one by sitting on top of the Fritaire air stand and allowed us to get a second layer of dehydration at one time. We tried some small strips of stew meat, that had been marinated, and some canned pineapple chunks. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture before they totally got eaten. They came out perfect following the instructions in the manual! It's much easier in this air fryer to dehydrate, because you can see what is happening, and know if you need to stop the dehydration sooner than what you thought for a perfect jerky or dried fruit
Now for those that are thinking about having this at home, to compare it to a large air fryer like you might already have,really there's one main difference, and that is the both size. And my large air fryer, I was able to get a decent size smaller Turkey in and cook it at the holidays. While in theory I could do the same in the Fritaire, it would be a bit smaller than the one I could get in my other air fryer, and because the bottom is rounded it might not sit level. Truly that is really the only difference we have found so far.
Now what my large air fryer cannot do, is clean itself. I don't think any air fryers can. But the Fritaire can! You just add one to two inches of soapy water, set it on 400 and put the proper time in, and let it clean itself. It is sort of fun to watch the water swirling around! But make sure you don't put anything over 2 in, as if anything hits the rotisserie flap it will leak out, which I found by mistake the first time. I would say for 90% of the time the self cleaner works perfectly and after you dump the water you just need to wipe it with a paper towel. However if you have anything that really got stuck on, you might need to scrub with a wet soapy sponge to get it off. That's so cleaning future makes it really great for your teens to use it in a dorm room, as once it gets done they can let it cool and go dump the water out and wipe it clean.
So is this your all-in-one appliance that your kids need in their dorm?
I think it ties with a microwave quite easily, however it produces healthier food!
Thanks to the 60-day warranty, you can feel safe ordering online and returning if you have to, if it doesn't work for some reason. Be sure to check, because they are running some specials including a free recipe book or free shipping, off and on before back to school. It truly is the back to school appliance that they need.
And for your kids, or you, be sure to check out the website for plenty of recipes and new ways to cook with your air fryer that you may not have thought of, thanks to the additional accessories included with the Fritaire.
Did you know that you are actually supposed to be replacing your air fryer annually if it's nonstick? That was something I learned of the Fritaire blog that I was unaware of. So technically, we're at the right time to be replacing ours. How about you?
Thought so!
Head on over and check out the website today and read all the specs available, and you'll realize this is the appliance that's actually better to cook with and safer for you, and in the long run it might be more expensive , but you don't have to replace it annually! Fritaire just makes sense!
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