Reviewing the Fritaire Self-Cleaning Air Fryer

Technical innovations have made cooking meals at home faster, easier, and have expanded people’s ability to serve healthier and more innovative dishes. Over the last 50 years, we seen a number of introductions, including the microwave convection ovens, induction cooktops, multi-function cookers like the Instant Pot, and sous vide.

Another more recent cooking innovation that’s taken the market by storm is air frying.

The air fryer was developed by Fred van der Weij, a Dutch inventor, in the mid-2000s. The first air fryer based on his work was released by Philips in 2010.

Air fryers can be thought of as a convection oven on steroids. They incorporate a heating element and a fan that circulates very hot air around the food being cooked. An air fryer uses high heat and faster fan speeds to concentrate heat more than a convection oven, producing crispier food. Crispy French fries and chicken can be cooked in an air fryer with 80% less oil than is required when these foods are cooked through deep frying. This makes air fryers a much healthier alternative.

Today, air fryers come in a number of different forms:

1. A standalone, countertop appliance
2. Built into a countertop toaster oven
3. Built into a standard oven

Future Products

Future Products is a Miami, Florida based company started by the wife and husband team of Irie and Andreas Hansen. Their goal is to reinvent common kitchen appliances to include new features and technologies. They currently have three brands underneath the umbrella of Future Products:

1. Carbon8: A sparkling mineral water dispenser.
2. UVI: A self-heating and self-sanitizing lunchbox.
3. Fritaire: A self-cleaning air fryer.

The Fritaire Air Fryer combines innovative design with user-friendly features. It consists of a large glass bowl/base and a lid that includes the heating element and control module. Key features include:

• Self-Cleaning: Add water and dish soap to the glass bowl, set the Fritaire to 400 degrees for 10 minutes, and the Fritaire will clean itself.
• Versatile Accessories: Comes with a battery powered rotisserie (four AAA batteries, not included), French tumbler, air stand, rotisserie motor, and a rotisserie/tumbler grabber tool.
• Compact Design: Its pod-shaped structure saves counter space, and the 5-quart capacity is suitable for serving 3-5 people.
• User-Friendly Controls: Equipped with six one-touch cooking functions for French fries, meat, seafood, chicken, baking, and dehydrating.
• Healthier Cooking: Constructed from Teflon-free, BPA-free, and non-toxic materials, ensuring safe food preparation.

Hands On with the Fritaire Air Fryer

Future Products provided me with a Fritaire air fryer for this article.

The first thing you notice is that the Fritaire is not a small countertop appliance. I would estimate that it takes up about the same space as a KitchenAid stand mixer. However, the Fritaire goes beyond the capabilities of most air fryers. With the inclusion of a rotisserie, it can better be described as a countertop air fryer/oven.

Packaged with the Fritaire is a quick start guide and an instruction booklet. The instructions leave a bit to be desired. They aren’t that clear and the printing is very small. Unless you are 20 years old with perfect vision you may find it easier to read them with a magnifying glass.

To make up for the instructions, Fritaire has some short videos on their website that demonstrate using the rotisserie, using the French tumbler, and self-cleaning the glass bowl/base. Once you understand the basics of operating the Fritaire from these videos, the company also has some nice recipes on their website. These can get you started with a wide range of cooking choices from roasting a chicken to baking deserts.

One of the major advantages to the design of the Fritaire is the glass bowl/base. This allows you to easily view your food as you cook it. However, you will still want to check the internal temperature of your food to make sure it has been cooked to a food-safe temperature as the external appearance of food is not an adequate guide to doneness. Using a MeatStick wireless thermometer (I wrote an article about MeatStick’s latest thermometer that can be found on the Residential Tech Today website here) with the Fritaire makes cooking both safe and easy as you won’t have to pause cooking and remove the lid to check the internal temperature of the food you are cooking. The MeatStick Chef thermometer seemed to be ideal for use with the Fritaire due to its small size.

Our first cooking try was a rotisserie chicken. I’m a fan of roasted Peruvian chicken so I found a recipe online and followed it to marinate and spice the chicken. The documented capacity of the Fritaire for roasting a chicken is between 3 and 4 pounds. I purchased a 3.6-pound chicken, and it was as large as I think would fit in the Fritaire as it rubbed against the bottom of the glass bowl and knocked the rotisserie motor off its twist on mounting during cooking. To solve this problem, I piled up a few books next to the motor and that kept it from twisting off its mount.

The Fritaire did a good job of cooking the chicken, the meat was moist and tender, but the skin was not as crispy as the Peruvian chicken roasted at a Peruvian Restaurant. I believe this was due to the chicken rubbing against the bottom of the glass bowl where some of the marinade and drippings from the chicken collected. A smaller chicken should solve this issue.

That night my wife and I only consumed half the chicken. The next day we reheated the remaining chicken using the Fritaire by placing the chicken on the air stand inside the glass bowl. This time the chicken came out nice and crispy.

To self-clean the bowl you put a couple of inches of water in the bowl with some dish soap and run the air fryer at 400 degrees for 10 minutes. The cleaning process did a very good job of cleaning the majority of the bowl including drippings that had fused themselves onto the bottom of the bowl.

We also tried cooking

• French fries – A classic food to cook in an air fryer
• Panko Crusted Fried Chicken
• And a handful of additional recipes

All of the dishes cooked using the Fritaire were very successful though the French fries weren’t quite as crisp as some I’ve had that were cooked with other air fryers. They might have needed cooking a little longer with the Fritaire to be crispier.

Besides the issue with the rotisserie motor described above, the only problem I had with the Fritaire was the design of the air stand. The air stand is used to support food in the bottom of the glass bowl so air can flow underneath the food for thorough cooking. Unfortunately, the round inside of the glass bowl doesn’t properly support the air stand and it is very unstable. For example, if you try to stab a piece of food with a fork to remove it from the Fritaire after cooking, the air stand will slide away from you making it challenging to stab the food. Even placing food on the air stand for cooking is a bit challenging because of the air stand sliding around in the glass bowl. If the inside of the bowl simply had some internal “nubs”, to support the air stand, it would work much better.

In spite of these few issues, the Fritaire was a quality product and did a good job cooking healthy and delicious food.