Philips Airfryer No Fat Fryer - Hot Chips, or Hot Air?

Imagine if you could cook your chips without using any fat whatsoever. That'd certainly make losing weight a lot easier! Well, you (almost) can.

How does the unlimited chips diet sound to you?? It sounds good to me.

The Philips Airfryer uses just one half a spoon of oil to cook fresh chips, instead of boiling chips in hot fat, it uses super-heated air, producing a fabulous looking brown and crispy finish. Apart from the obvious savings in calories and fat, this is actually a major safety benefit in the home. More house fires are caused by chip fat than any other source. So, not only are you saving your family's waistline, but potentially their lives as well!

The Philips Airfryer uses a combination of a fan and a grill, blasting super-heated hot air around the food at high speeds. There's a scientific name for this, the Maillard Effect. The chips brown and crisp in the same way that toasting works.

This is a new product, fresh to market, so supplies might be hard to track down at present as Philips only recently unveiled the Airfryer at the IFA Consumer Electronics Show in Berlin, Germany.

It takes just three minutes for the AirFryer to heat up to the required temperature, with many foods you won't even need to add any oil, many foods will cook simply by the hot air process.

The AirFryer works a bit like a coffee maker, you slide out the cooking compartment and drop the food inside, although for a large family, the space is limited.  However, the good news is that it doesn't take long to do a second batch!

In the top half of the AirFryer, you'll find the grill and the fan.  The bottom section contains the pull-out food basket, that has two separate compartments.  Fill them both with chips, or perhaps put chips in one side and nuggets in the other!

The total capacity for chips is 700g of frozen chips, making enough for a family of four.  This means filling both compartments with chips, so if you're going to cook something else with the chips, then it's going to produce a meal for two at a time. 

The maximum cooking temperature you can set the Philips AirFryer to is 200^o.  There's a timer, which can be set up to 30 minutes.  One safety feature of the Philips AirFryer is that if you're cooking chips late at night, it's on a timer, so if you do nod off, you won't set fire to your house!

The Philips AirFryer will quite happily cook chips from frozen in under 10 minutes.  Much quicker than going to the chip shop.  Although the Philips AirFryer is quite expensive, at about £200, if it saves you going to the chip shop once a week for your family, it can easily pay for itself in a year on chips alone! 

It's not just chips that you can cook in this fab new gadget. While the AirFryer was invented to cook chips without fat, it's got a whole host of other uses.

The AirFryer comes with a Recipe Book, but here are a few ideas of things you can cook with the AirFryer:

• Frozen chips, fresh chips
  
• Frozen chicken nuggets
• Chicken wings, chicken legs, chicken breasts
  
• Steak, hamburgers, beefburgers
• Pizza, cheese sticks
  
• Cakes! Yes, even cakes, which take 25 minutes to cook.
  

And a lot more...

As this is a newly launched product, supplies are a bit thin on the ground. You can't even get it on Amazon at the time of writing.

I'm sure some of the big retailers will start to make it available through their ebay shops soon though!

If you're after an air fryer, then some similar systems are also called a greaseless fryer.

A fat free chip fryer would make a fabulous Xmas present, at a time when everybody's thinking about losing weight in the New Year, having a present like this means it's possible to start straight away on the healthy eating resolutions.

The Philips Air Fryer is a great gift at any time of the year though. Maybe a gift to yourself, or a friend who is moving house. What about that person that's difficult to buy for as they're always on a diet, or even a surprise wedding gift with a difference.

Poll Resuls

At the time of writing, 81% of poll respondents on this article say they can't wait to try out the new Philips Air Fryer, so it's probably going to be the hottest kitchen gadget this year!