this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2024
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Convection ovens. The branding of 'air fryer' always makes me cringe.
I was like you once and believed a convection oven and air fryer are the same thing and produce the same results. But I was wrong!
There is a subtle but crucial difference between an air fryer and a convection oven. A convection oven only circulates air around inside the oven, keeping the steam trapped with the food, while an air fryer actually removes all of the steam away from the food, allowing it to get much crispier much faster than is possible with a convection oven.
You are kind of right though, because now that air fryers have become popular, they've started marketting small toaster-oven-style convection ovens as "air fryers", even though they legitimately are not air fryers and do not cook the food the same way that an air fryer does.
so an air fryer is more like a small convection oven?
if you want the steam to escape, you can just open the oven door for a few seconds and there it goes.
also the air circulation is more intense in an air fryer, and it's a smaller enclosed space which is easier to keep at a high temperature. both of these also help food cook more evenly.
I wonder if I could DIY an air fryer with a heat gun, a metal box, and a PID controller.
Hmm. Diluting the air will be the hardest thing: A run off the mill heat gun will do 600C at 2000W in a concentrated stream, if you regulate it down to air frying temperature you'll get very little total power so you'll want to cool it down by pulling in additional ambient air instead. But with that out of the way... add a metal box and a timer? The heat gun already regulates the temperature. Probably not via PID though, just pre-set power levels for coils and fan they're not exactly precision instruments.
...and all that made me wonder and apparently there's no culinary heat guns which would be a smart choice because they'd pay attention for all materials to be food-safe. But there are hobbyists reporting great results using standard heat guns instead of the usual torch. Not, to be honest, that you'd expect standard lighter gas to be food-grade, of course.
I wasn't thinking of trying to regulate down the power on the heat gun itself, I was thinking of cycling it on and off (or cycling between heat and fan-only mode) to maintain thermostatic control of the temperature in the box.
Set a temperature, have an exhaust, the temperature inside will be within a wibble of your set-point because the air stream will completely dominate over any other source of temperature raise/drop. You're way overcomplicating things. Forego subtlety, consider the air as a bulldozer: If this was a closed system having feedback control would be a good idea but air frying is supposed to use fresh outside air so that the hot air is really dry and the intake air being a couple degrees hotter or colder won't make a difference in practice. Just smash that shit.