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Does the Philips Air-fryer work as well as a standard deep-fryer?
Most of what I've been reading about Air Fryers is centered on:
Being a veggie, I am curious how Vegetables turn out inside an Air Fryer; let's say at a variety/ range of settings from start/ low to high?
Would it any stage be able to an alternative to Stir Frying?
Having experimented with an air fryer I think it's an alternative to stir frying, but not a particularly good one. An air fryer is basically a device that blows hot air on food as it slowly stirs it around. It seems to work ok as long as the vegetables are hard, if they get a bit soft and sloppy (think cooked zucchini, eggplant) they do not stir effectively as they rely on ingredients tumbling over each other to bring bottom ones to the top.
Air fryers don't cook as quickly as stir frying, you can cook food much faster on a nice hot wok or pan than an air frier on its hottest setting.
You don't use less oil in an air frier than stir frying, you use the same as if you stir fry on a non-stick pan. Dry frying didn't work well for me in an air frier but a bit of water kept things moving until the cooking process got moisture out of the ingredients.
You can leave an air frier unattended, but you have to be willing to get overcooked results unless you check on it frequently towards the end of the cooking process. Also, the stirring is not perfect so you can occasionally get ingredients bunched up and need to clear it. So as long as you check on it occasionally it will probably work fine. Call it semi-unattended cooking.
Essentially, if you want to do semi-unattended vegetable cooking as a use case, or you can't have a stove/hotplate then it makes sense to go with an air frier, but if it's good results that count to you then stir frying the old fashioned way is your best choice.
