First off, I absolutely hate cooking. I don't like the mess. It takes too much time. My recipes never turn out like they show in the cookbooks...and my cooking is pretty awful. I got the Cosori Air Fryer a couple of weeks ago, and I've been happily cooking every day, multiple times a day since.
You just pull it out of the box, and it's ready to go. The detachable basket and pan are all that needed cleaning in soapy water before adding food. The buttons are self-explanatory. You've got a snowflake for frozen foods, fries for fries, bacon for bacon, and also Preheat and Keep Warm.
When I first turned it on, I wasn't sure what to expect. I wondered if it was going to get hot and scorch my counter (or me). I thought it would be noisy. It was none of those things. It does get a little warm on the outside but not hot like an oven. You do need to be careful when you're pulling the basket out or any food from inside the fryer because it's deceiving that it works so quickly and gets food that hot that fast. As for noise, you can hear the air moving, but I wouldn't call it noisy. My Alexa is near the air fryer, and the Alexa hears me just fine when I'm talking while the air fryer is running. Also, since my Alexa is near the air fryer, you can tell that the air fryer doesn't get too hot or spit things at you or I wouldn't have the Alexa there.
The air fryer looks great on my counter too. It's already become a conversation piece in my kitchen. I had family over this weekend, and they wanted to know what it was. I put on a kitchen demo of sorts, and everyone stood around and watched, then ate all of the food (not a crumb left on the plates!), and then they said they needed to get an air fryer too.
So far, I've tried recipes in the included recipe book as well as a recipe for chicken fried steak in an air fryer cookbook I purchased separately. What's great about the cookbook included in the Cosori air fryer is that each recipe has a picture with it, and the ingredients aren't intimidating to those of you like me who don't care for cooking. Most recipes call for ingredients you've actually heard of and probably have in your pantry -- a real plus for me because I also hate wandering around in a grocery store searching for a random ingredient I'll only use once.
The very first recipe I tried was sweet potato fries in the included Cosori cookbook. I like my fries a little crunchy, so I probably could have left them in the air fryer a few minutes longer than the recipe called for, but they were still delicious. Definitely the best sweet potato fries I've ever had.
For fun, I then threw in some frozen okra I had bought in the freezer section. I bought a water bottle and filled it with olive oil, so all I did was lightly squirt the olive oil on the okra while in the air fryer basket and then just pushed the snowflake button. The okra came out so crunchy, just the way I like it. And I couldn't believe it had gone from frozen to crispy crunchy in just a matter of minutes. Most of them were golden brown, but I could tell the ones that I had missed when I sprayed the okra with the olive oil. Those were white -- still crunchy and tasted fine, but a weird-looking white. I've since bought a pressurized oil sprayer can that's specifically for spraying olive oil, and it works much better at spraying everything evenly than my plastic water bottle.
Same night and onto my third recipe: chicken fried steak. Now, this recipe wasn't in the incuded Cosori cookbook. This particular cookbook didn't have a picture, so I wasn't at all sure how it would turn out. It's so good, I've cooked it twice in three nights.
That night's entire meal was cooked in the air fryer: sweet potato fries, frozen-turned-air fried okra, and chicken fried steak. It felt like an elaborate meal with hardly any time invested, and my kitchen wasn't a disaster after cooking all of that. I only had a few plates and a couple of bowls that I'd used instead of pots and pans and baking dishes all piled up on my counter with a greasy stove to clean.
The next day, I tried the mozzarella cheese sticks in the included Cosori cookbook. I totally botched this recipe, using baking soda instead of cornstarch. Did I mention how bad I am at cooking? Even so, the mozzarella sticks worked out okay (but not great, which was likely my own fault). They crisped up nicely and quickly. They just didn't look a thing like the picture in the recipe book. I would have also liked the cheese to be more melted on the inside. It seemed like the outside was really crispy and the inside wasn't really melted. This could all be because of my using the wrong ingredient, so I'll give it another shot because, even with the wrong ingredient, they weren't bad. They didn't taste like mozzarella cheese sticks, but they were still good.
For dinner, I cooked the kids grilled cheese sandwiches also using the included cookbook. These didn't turn out as expected. At least I used the right ingredients this time. But the cheese wasn't gooey like it would be if you cooked it on the stove. If I had doubled the amount of cheese the recipe called for it would probably be perfect. The bread was golden brown, though. It was a bit of a pain to have to melt butter on the stove, then brush it onto the bread, then grate cheese before putting it into the air fryer. I can get a grilled cheese sandwich in a pan quicker than that, but it was still fun to try. I'll try the recipe again with more cheese. I think it's a recipe I can tinker with to make perfect.
I then tried the pizza from the Cosori recipe book. I didn't use pizza dough. I prefer pita bread. I followed the instructions as if it was pizza dough, which means you preheat the air fryer, brush your crust with olive oil, and then put it in the air fryer at 320 for five minutes. Then you take it out to add toppings. On mine, I put pizza sauce, pepperoni, mozzarella, and parmesan. Pop it back into the air fryer for another five minutes at 320, and it's done. It was so good. I'll be making another for lunch. The only downside was having to cook one at a time because I couldn't fit two pieces of pita bread in the basket together.
My most-recent recipe to try is the coconut shrimp, which is also in the cookbook that comes with the air fryer. What would normally be a giant mess of the kitchen was only three bowls to dredge the coconut shrimp and then a plate to put them on. You preheat the air fryer while you're getting everything ready, and then pop the shrimp in for eight minutes. They were very tasty, but I'll add more coconut in my dredge next time than the recipe calls for. The recipe was good, but I couldn't really taste the coconut.
I keep picking out new recipes to try in the cookbook, which is a first for me with my loathe of cooking. I've included pictures of the country fried steak, pizza, grilled cheese, mozzarella sticks, and coconut shrimp that I've made so far.
Even owning the 5.8 quart, you have to get used to cooking in batches. I wanted to make four chicken fried steaks that first night, but there was only room for two. Not a big deal. You just have to cook in batches. Making three pita bread pizzas, I just had to make each one separately since I could only fit one round piece of pita in at a time. For the grilled cheese sandwiches, two actually fit into the air fryer at the same time.
Like I said before, the cookbook that comes with the air fryer is full of pictures. It also has more than 100 pages of recipes. For example, you'll find recipes for strawberry cream scones, stuffed french toast, BBQ bacon, ribeye, meatballs, fried chicken, crab cakes, wings, pigs in a blanket, french fries, onion rings, roasted corn, cheddar buttermilk biscuits, cinnamon rolls, pound cake, and orange cranberry muffins. I would be lost without the cookbook. It also tells you exactly which button to push on the air fryer too, so you're learning about how to use your air fryer while you're actually cooking instead of having to read an instruction manual cover to cover before you even have enough confidence to cook something.
I mentioned not having many dishes to clean after using the air fryer. What I love most about cleanup is how easy the air fryer itself is to clean. Everything just slides off of it. I'm barely scrubbing it, and it's clean. I know the description says it's dishwasher safe, but I just wash it in the sink because there's nothing ever dried on and stuck to it. I love how I can put a little soap on it, and it's clean and ready for my next recipe. The water beads on it, so it dries really fast.
The only negative about the air fryer is probably my own impatience with one of the controls. The temp/time is shared by one button. If you have a recipe that calls for you to adjust the temp and/or time, you have to toggle the button. It starts with temp, so if you need to change how long to keep something in, you hit the temp/time button again. Somehow, I keep managing to hit time when I mean temp and vice versa.
Also, the air fryer cuts off when you pull the basket out, just as it should so it's not running while there's nothing in the bottom. When you pop the basket back in, it defaults back to the original temp and time settings when you turn it on, not what you last had on there. It would be nice if it remembered what your setting was 5 minutes before. For example, the other night when I had to make the pizzas in batches, I had to run the air fryer 5 minutes for one crust, then five minutes for the next, and so on. Every time, I had to reset the time and temp when I pulled a crust out. That's when I began noticing how bad I was at toggling the temp/time button I mentioned above.
Both the time/temp button being shared and the air fryer not remembering your last time/temp are extremely minor downsides. But they're the only negatives I could think of because this air fryer has quickly become my favorite kitchen appliance.
I have never had any experience with an air fryer, so I have nothing to compare the Cosori air fryer against. But I did my research. read the reviews, watched videos, and crossed my fingers that I was buying the right one. I couldn't have made a better choice. I'm actually excited to cook for the first time ever. Tomorrow on the breakfast menu: french toast sticks!
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