by D-Machine | 2025-12-13 23:08:31+00:00
Thanks for this video, it is an interesting one. I have a lot of respect for MC, but, unfortunately, I do not find this video convincing at all.

It isn't clear to me that it matters if a fan is on the side or below or sucks or blows, because with sufficient speed you get turbulence, and air is flowing in all sorts of directions. The claim doesn't pass a basic physics smell test, nor does the video's claim about blowing from the side "fighting the natural tendency of steam to rise", which is only relevant if your fan is seriously under-powered. Also, where does that steam go? It is just re-circulated, unless the oven is properly vented, which is the real factor here. You only get "pockets of humidity" in a really trash convection oven or if you seriously over-crowd your food, or in bad "energy-efficient" ovens that maintain efficiency by just trapping steam. Could it be that the average / cheap convection oven is poorly vented and has an underpowered fan, relative to the average air-fryer? Probably. But I remain unconvinced they are meaningfully different from a decent convection oven.

Part of the reason I don't believe the claims is that I use the technique in the video already to make very crisp oven fries that approach the ones in the video even in a non-convection, regular oven. Getting this right was an obsession for me for some time, and the trick is getting the par-cook perfect, not over-shaking, the right kind of potatoes, the stupid amounts of oil (which effectively causes the outsides to fry anyway and properly crisp), and the right oven temp. You do regularly have to also toss them in the oven, just like he regularly shakes his in the fryer. Getting all those things right is the main trick here, and is very, very hard to do right, probably about 90% of the challenge. In fact, getting the par-cook wrong can even make a deep-fried fry worse than a properly par-cooked and prepared oven fry, and knowing the importance of all these other factors, I find it incredibly implausible that the different direction of convection in an air-fryer is a significant factor.

Perhaps a regular oven can get you to only 80%, a convection to 90%, and an air-fryer to 100% of what he achieves, and perhaps this is because the air fryer makes it less work and more consistent, since you can toss them with less overall heat loss. Or perhaps if he spent just as many weeks perfecting convection oven fries they would be indistinguishable. The side-by-side comparison with a convection oven is what I need to see to be actually convinced an air-fryer is anything unique, and weak and untested arguments about air-flow direction aren't doing it for me.

EDIT: Also I originally stated "Air-fryers are just small ovens, they do not meaningfully crisp almost anything without serious modifications to the recipe and approach, and most crispy textures can only be properly achieved by deep frying", and note that this remains true. Yes, a good chef can achieve crisp in clever ways other than deep or shallow frying, and I have my own bag of tricks, but in practice it is a lot harder, less consistent, only works for a very limited number of foods, and still generally requires you use a large amount of oil.

EDIT2: If you read through the YouTube comments on that video, you also find out he is using frozen fries, which he admits are almost always par-fried in oil anyway! So the recipe was still relying on deep-frying!