Kitchen appliance advice you can check yourself
Kitchenine researches kitchen appliances the slow way. Every factual claim links back to the document it came from, whether that is a food safety regulator, a manufacturer manual, or an independent testing lab. Where the evidence runs out, we say so rather than guess.
Sources, not opinions
Claims are traced to regulators, standards bodies, and independent laboratories. The links are in the article, not hidden in a footer.
Limits stated plainly
Most of our guides carry a section listing what the evidence cannot answer. An unanswered question is more useful than a confident invention.
Disagreement is published
When two credible sources conflict, we show the conflict instead of quietly picking whichever number reads better.
Start here
Three questions that bring most people to this site, answered from primary sources.
Safety
Is air fryer non-stick coating safe?
What European and German food safety authorities actually concluded about PTFE, the temperature where it stops being stable, and why “PFOA-free” does not mean what the box implies.
Buying
What size air fryer do you need?
The litres printed on the box measure empty space, not food. A published capacity table shows a 9.5-litre model holding less than an 8.5-litre one.
Running cost
Do air fryers use a lot of electricity?
The wattage on the label is a ceiling, not an average. Dividing measured kilowatt-hours by cooking time shows what the machine really draws.
Air fryers
Safety questions, strange smells, and the things manufacturers put in the manual but not on the box.
- Why does my air fryer smell like plastic? What the smell is, when it should fade, and the point at which it stops being normal.
- Is air fryer non-stick coating safe? Regulator positions on PTFE, and the temperature where the answer changes.
- Can you put aluminium foil in an air fryer? One manufacturer says yes, another says no. Both have a reason, and the reason matters.
- Air fryer liners: parchment vs silicone safety rules The largest parchment maker advises against using its own standard parchment in an air fryer.
- Do air fryers use a lot of electricity? Measured energy use, converted to US rates, and the situation where the saving disappears.
- Why is my air fryer smoking? Four causes, ordered from harmless to stop-using-it-now.
Buying guides
Structural trade-offs rather than rankings. We explain what you are choosing between, so the decision survives a change in model lineup.
- What size air fryer do you need? Why claimed litres and usable capacity are different measurements.
- Basket vs oven-style air fryers One trades crisping for capacity. Which side of that trade suits you is not a matter of quality.
Care and maintenance
Keeping an appliance working, and recognising the point where keeping it is the wrong call.
- How to clean an air fryer heating element The one component you cannot put under a tap, and the methods we declined to recommend.
- When should you replace an air fryer basket? Three independent sources give three different lifespans. Here is why, and what to watch instead.
What this site does not do
Kitchenine does not run a product testing laboratory, and it does not pretend to. You will not find claims about weeks of personal use behind these articles, because that is not where the information comes from.
What we do instead is read the primary documents carefully, compare them against each other, and show the working. When a manufacturer contradicts an independent laboratory, both positions are quoted. When a figure comes from our own arithmetic on someone else’s published data, that is labelled as ours.
The full method, including how sources are chosen and what happens when we get something wrong, is set out on the How We Research page.
Some articles on this site contain affiliate links. If you buy through one of them we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Commissions never determine what we recommend, and any article containing such a link says so at the top. Full details are on the Affiliate Disclosure page.