The air fryer has competition.
You’ve either got one or you’ve heard about how everyone’s got one – either way, it’s difficult to avoid air fryer chat nowadays.
Hailed as the best thing since sliced bread, air fryer owners would have you believe that purchasing the device is the best decision they’ve made in the last five years.
It’s easy to see why in fairness. You can pretty much cook anything in them, it’s a much healthier alternative to frying things in oil, and they can be more energy-efficient than an oven.
But some people reckon they’ve found a cheaper alternative to the air fryer, which still has all the health benefits: halogen ovens.
A halogen oven is a big glass bowl with a lid containing halogen bulbs and a fan. When switched on, infrared radiation beams from the bulbs create heat, which is circulated around the oven by the fan.
You can often pick up a halogen oven for less than an air fryer, the Irish Mirror reports, with 17-litre models going for as little as £34.98 on Amazon and less than £30 at B&Q (prices correct at the time of writing).
Just like an air fryer, the halogen oven is cheaper to run than an oven when cooking some everyday items. Research from Which? found that when cooking chips, a halogen oven cost 5p less than a traditional oven, while an air fryer was 16p cheaper to run.
For a jacket potato, the halogen oven (25p) was again 5p cheaper when compared to a normal oven (30p). Both were once again trumped by the air fryer, which used just 11p’s worth of energy to cook a jacket potato.
Perhaps the main benefit of the halogen oven though is that, because it’s made from glass, you can see how your food is coming along whilst it’s cooking.
So, before you buy that air fryer for your parents for Christmas, maybe consider the halogen oven.
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(First published on JOE.co.uk).
