My Favorite Thing to Emerge from My Air Fryer

This appliance has been a sleeper hit in my kitchen.

Hello and happy fall! It always comes as a shock that the transition from summer to fall has absolutely no grease. For me it hit just yesterday when school started in NYC — walking outside my apartment in the morning there was suddenly all this activity, whereas 24 hours prior I felt a pleasant (if steamy) slumber out on the streets.

I’m not ready to let go of the low-effort energy of summer, at least as far as cooking goes, and with so much good produce still out there, there’s no reason. But today, I’m leaning into a different kind of low-effort. Today I’m talking freezer veg and air fryers.

Like many, I was skeptical of this appliance at first, which is just countertop electric convection ovens, and I believed, also like many, that a good toaster oven that has a convection setting would prove to be more versatile for most people.

But then a few years ago I had the chance to test out a bunch of air fryers, and I realized there was something about that act of shaking the “fryer” basket — a quintessential move if you’ve ever operated a deep fryer, as you drain your food of the hot oil — that’s uniquely satisfying.

Then over the summer I got into the habit of using mine even more regularly. I didn’t want to turn on my oven, and the air-fryer, it turns out, is quite a bit more energy efficient. So I now must concede that they’re pretty great for cooking (small batches of) certain foods, from sweet potato fries and veggie burgers to cubes of eggplant and tofu.

Add to that list anything frozen, with frozen artichoke hearts being my top fave. They get so nice and crispy and feel special, even when they start as a $3.29 bag you can get at Trader Joe’s and dump directly into the air-fryer basket. They make an easy side dish or quick and fun appetizer, and today, I’m sharing how they make an enticing feature of a composed main dish, too.

The other component here is something that’s also cheap and feels fancy: whipped tofu. Truthfully, that phrase doesn’t excite me even though I love tofu, because I have visceral memories of experimenting with tofu paste as a veggie burger binder. But with a number of tofu-based pasta sauces crossing my radar recently, plus the “nonatto” in Wordloaf’s newsletter (featuring Julia Tausch’s vegan anchovy paste; I still haven’t made this, but I will) I remembered that I needed to give blended tofu another chance.