The Kambrook AirChef sells itself as a healthier way to fry foods. You’re not really frying, but if your appetite is modest, it’s a neat kitchen gadget.
Air fryers seem to be somewhat the kitchen gadget du jour of the moment, in the way that everything from bread makers to expensive blenders have been in the past. The Kambrook AirChef, like its contemporaries, pitches itself as a healthy alternative to dipping your food directly into oil for the purposes of frying.
There’s some debate around labelling fats as “healthy” or “unhealthy”, but I’ve hit relatively little literature that seriously suggests that fried foods are the basis for a healthy diet, so anything that reduces your oil intake in that fashion isn’t likely to gain the ire of too many nutritionists. Although I’m certain having written this down that at least one will take umbrage. Go ahead — I’ll hide behind the Kambrook AirChef.
Actually, that wouldn’t work all that well, because the Kambrook AirChef is a relatively small cooking oven, roughly 30x24x26 with a cooking capacity of only 2.5 litres. I’m not quite that small.
It’s important to realise that despite all the promises of healthy “frying” what the Kambrook AirChef does is almost always not actually frying. You’re more cooking with convection, using heated air passed over the 2.5L basket of food to cook your food. Some recipes do call for a light dusting of oil, but this is far removed from any kind of deep frying process.
Operation of the Kambrook AirChef is a simple enough process, with a single dial for temperature setting from 80-200 degrees Celsius and another timer dial for cooking times from one to thirty minutes of cooking time. The Kambrook AirChef only kicks into gear when you’ve set both a temperature and a time to cook to. You can adjust the time upwards while cooking, but there’s no way to adjust cooking time downwards once you’ve set the dial. You could always cut the power and let the mechanical timer simply click down, however.
Operation of the Kambrook AirChef is quite simple, and it’s easy enough to clean, with the food basket simply popping out from the main tray. Both are easy to clean and dry with relatively few pesky corners to scrub out.
The real test of any kitchen gadget of this type is to throw various food types at it. Air fryers aren’t exactly new, and the advantage here is that there’s a lot of recipes and ideas to try out.
So naturally, I started with chips, because of course you would.
The Air Fryer did a decent but not stellar job with chips, or at least with a 1Kg bag of cheap Coles chips. Sure, I shouldn’t expect perfection out of cheap supermarket potato-style products, but starting with the chips did point out where the Kambrook AirChef can be a little frustrating.
The capacity of the basket is 2.5 litres, but filling it significantly makes it very hard to accurately cook everything within. The less you put in, the more likely you are to get a crispy and pleasant result.
You’ve also got to remember to move the food around in the basket, either by pulling it out mid-cook and giving it a direct shake, or by using an implement to shift it around a little. It’s not quite a set-and-forget operation, unless you like some food with the chance of slightly burnt corners.
Which isn’t to say that you can’t produce some very tasty food with the Kambrook AirChef. It did a superb job of some simple chicken strips — literally nothing more than chicken thighs, egg and a little crumb — and is likewise a stellar way to cook bacon.
I would show the after pic for the bacon, but every time I cook bacon in the Kambrook AirChef, it never lasts long enough to be photographed.
Some other recipes found online — some explicitly for the Kambrook AirChef, others not so much so — worked with varying degrees of success. It’s worth noting that by topping out at 200 degrees, it doesn’t get quite as hot as some competing air fryers, which could affect some recipes.
A recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich was kind of irresistible in a how-bad-could-this-be way. The answer, it turns out, is fairly bad, with limply and unevenly toasted bread filled with molten cheese. It just plain didn’t work, but the fun of cooking is in experimenting and accepting that things sometimes go awry. There will always be another grilled cheese sandwich, but I’ll make that in a more regular jaffle iron appliance, I think.
The capacity of the Kambrook AirChef isn’t immense, and that brings up another potential issue. This is a great little oven for a single person or even a couple if you didn’t have space for a regular oven and only wanted smallish meals, but if you’re feeding a family, you’re going to struggle to produce enough food from its small basket. As mentioned, it’s great for bacon, and I’ve used that to produce bacon for hamburgers cooked elsewhere, but if I tried to make a complete family meal in it, we’d all go just a little bit hungry.
With an RRP of $169.95, the Kambrook AirChef could be a decent buy for singles or very small families wanting to cut down on their reliance on “frying” foods (or takeaway chips). It’s certainly a fun gadget to experiment with, even if not every cooking experiment ends up a success.