What are you cooking?
Times and temperatures for the air fryer you actually own — plus what to do when it smokes, what can safely go in it, and why every chart you have read says something different.
- Find a foodEvery food we hold a figure for, fresh, frozen and reheated.
- Cooking AdvisorTell it the food and your machine; it works out what applies.
- Straight from frozenUsually cooler and longer, and never guessed from the fresh time.
- Reheating leftoversThe one job an air fryer beats every other appliance at.
Popular things to cook
Each page gives a temperature and a time range, says what size and quantity it assumes, and tells you how to know it is done rather than trusting the clock.
Chicken breast
Lean, tapering and unforgiving: the cut with the narrowest window between cooked and dry.
FreshFrom frozenLeftover (reheating)
Sausages
Skins that brown early and centres that finish late — the classic false-done food.
From frozenLeftover (reheating)Fresh
Frozen chips
The single most cooked food in this appliance class, and the one crowding ruins.
From frozenLeftover (reheating)
Chicken wings
The cut air fryers do genuinely better than an oven, provided the skin gets long enough to render.
FreshLeftover (reheating)From frozen
Bacon
Fast, easy and the commonest cause of a smoking air fryer — rendered fat on a hot surface.
Leftover (reheating)
Salmon fillet
One of the foods an air fryer does better than the alternatives, and quickly.
From frozenLeftover (reheating)Fresh
Roast potatoes
Parboiling is not optional, and it is what the air fryer cannot do for you.
FreshLeftover (reheating)
Jacket potato
Fresh jacket potatoes get sixty minutes at 180°C in one manufacturer's chart and twenty-five to forty minutes at 200°C in another's.
Leftover (reheating)Fresh
Steak
Air frying is a compromise for steak, and it is worth knowing which way the compromise runs.
FreshFrom frozen
What can I cook from frozen?
Air fryers are unusually good at this, and the technique is counter-intuitive: a lower temperature than the same food fresh, for longer. Where no manufacturer publishes a frozen figure, the page says so instead of adapting the fresh one.
Reheat tonight's leftovers
A microwave cannot re-crisp a pizza base and an oven takes fifteen minutes to warm up. Reheating is governed by a food-safety rule rather than a cooking chart, and every page here carries it.
Air fryer problems, solved
Each of these starts with the fastest thing to check, then narrows down. Where a symptom means stop using the appliance, that is the first thing it says.
- Food is not crisping — Almost always moisture that cannot get out, and almost always because there is too much in the basket. One manufacturer says so directly.
- The air fryer is smoking — Usually rendered fat on a hot surface below the basket. Distinguishing that from an electrical smell is the first thing to do.
- Food cooks unevenly — Airflow is not reaching every surface equally, and where it does not, food does not cook.
- Burnt outside, raw inside — The temperature is too high for the thickness. Heat is finishing the surface before it can reach the middle.
- Food comes out dry — The appliance works by removing surface water, so drying food out is its failure mode rather than an accident.
- The breading or coating falls off — Usually the fan, and usually because the coating was never dry enough to set before the airflow got to it.
Can this go in an air fryer?
Foil, parchment, glass, silicone. Manufacturers genuinely disagree about several of these, and where they do, AirfryerHQ shows the disagreement rather than picking a side.
Know your air fryer
A drawer, an oven-style cavity, a dual-zone machine and a built-in oven on air-fry mode are different appliances that happen to share a name. Almost everything that changes a cooking answer follows from which one you have.
- Basket air fryer
- Dual-basket air fryer
- Flex-drawer air fryer
- Oven-style air fryer
- Countertop oven with air fry
- Multicooker with air fry
- Combination microwave with air fry
- Built-in oven with an air-fry mode
Learn how air frying works
Not a science lecture — the four or five mechanisms that explain every piece of advice on this site, so you can work out an answer for a food nobody has written a page about.
- How air frying actually works — A small oven with a very fast fan, and everything that follows.
- Do you need to preheat? — What preheating changes, and when it does not.
- Air fryer vs oven — Where each one genuinely wins.
- Why published timings differ — Why two manuals give different answers for the same food.
Cleaning and looking after it
Grease is what smokes, and then what burns. The cleaning pages say what each part needs, how often, and which parts your manufacturer actually permits in a dishwasher.
Where these numbers come from
Cooking figures here are read from manufacturers’ own manuals and charts, and food-safety targets come from national authorities such as the Food Standards Agency. Every page shows which, and what it does not cover.
AirfryerHQ has not cooked or measured anything itself. 65 of the 529 cooking figures we publish are marked preliminary, which means no source we could find gives a number and what you are reading is our considered starting point. Those pages say so, on the figure, where you cannot miss it.
How this works · Evidence and sources · Safety methodology · Independence