We’re always ready to put the air fryer to the test to justify its permanent existence on the kitchen counter. At the same time, we know an air fryer isn’t a one-stop shop for small kitchen appliances — without blades or paddles, it can never replace a food processor or mixer.
But what if we compare an air fryer to a toaster? Heated toaster coils transform bread into something hot enough to melt butter, and sturdy enough to cradle a poached egg. While an air fryer doesn’t have the obvious mechanics of a toaster for bread transformation, its dry-air environment is at least likely to render sliced bread into something other than its original state.
Certainly, an air fryer can do many of the functions of a toaster oven: baking, broiling and reheating, for example. But what about making actual toast? The answer is maybe, with some caveats. Read on for the benefits and challenges of making toast in the air fryer.
Toast potential: Can an air fryer toast?
Consider the air fryer: It’s an appliance most similar in functionality to a convection oven.
A heating unit — typically located above the basket or bowl where food would be placed — is aided and abetted by a motor that rapidly circulates heated air. The moving air means that, at least theoretically, all surfaces of the food you’re cooking in the air fryer are being affected by heat simultaneously. The top surface closest to the heating unit will receive more heat. That’s why most air fryer preparations suggest a mid-cook flip.
As an entirely dry-heat cooking method, it’s the air in the air fryer that makes the exterior of many foods crispy. When already fried foods get reheated, for example, their breaded exteriors become crunchy and hot, as if just pulled from the deep fryer. Since “crunchy” and “hot” are what we typically want from toast (and with bread providing the “breading” in most fried foods), it’s logical that sliced bread in the air fryer could be rendered, well, toasty.
What happens when sliced bread goes in the air fryer?
The element that offers the promise of air-frying toast is also its liability: moving air. If you’ve ever experienced a slice of cheese gone rogue on top of a burger, or shredded cheese that goes everywhere other than where you initially placed it, you know that the air fryer’s circulation is actually quite powerful.
Bread slices, especially thin or airy ones, may not have the weight needed to anchor them during air-frying.
In my first attempt at air-fryer toast, one of the two conventional precut slices I placed in the basket was immediately blown onto its side. I was using a Ninja Crispi for the experiment, whose glass bowl immediately showed me what was going on inside. If this had happened in a drawer-style air fryer, though, I’d have been rightfully confused by the end result.
Moving the slices as close to the sides of the bowl as possible seemed to help them stay in place. Yet watching them in the air fryer during operation showed they were pretty much hoverboarding the entire time. (Crumbs in the basket during this toast experiment blew so forcefully like an actual tornado was happening inside there.)
I also tried air-fried toast with thicker slices cut from a loaf of French bread. These fared a little better. Neither of them flipped perpendicular during cooking, but it was clear they were still hoverboarding. I removed one of the pieces to let a single slice have a moment alone, and not only did it hover, but, unencumbered by the other slice, it actually rotated, exorcist-style.
Honestly? This was the most amused I’ve ever been while making toast, so that’s a point in its favor.
The verdict: Can an air fryer make toast?
With a few minutes of cooking time on each side, yes, the air fryer took sliced bread and effectively transformed it into something resembling toast, at least in texture. It’s worth noting, off the bat, that this is almost twice as long as my conventional toaster’s 2.5-minute cycle, so that’s less than ideal.
The air fryer method also results in a lot less color transformation from bread to toast. With a classic toaster, if the color is still pale, the toast isn’t yet ready. But the air fryer toast only had a couple of spots that got golden brown, and it still became crunchy — easily passing the auditory scrape test. Butter was melted, jam was spread and toast was enjoyed.
But would I do it again?
For everyday toast, I’m probably going to stick to an actual toaster. But it’s good to know that if ever the toaster is compromised (it becomes self-aware and therefore untrustworthy, for example) or if I need more slices in a single go, the air fryer could prove up to the challenge.
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