Featured Image Credit: Casual Cooking/YouTube / kajakiki/Getty
You can't deny the dominance of air fryers - practically everyone seems to be getting one for their countertop.
Perfect for making fries at home without having to awkwardly shake oven trays and for cooking ingredients with far less oil to make them a little healthier, most air fryer models look pretty much the same.
They tend to be fairly anonymous black blobs, and very few (if any) of them have an oven-style window to let you actually see what's going on inside.
This makes the air fryer actually somewhat mysterious - it's a bit like a magic box that you put food in, before waiting until it pops out fully cooked.
That's where the YouTube channel Casual Cooking steps in. They uploaded a short video back in 2021 investigating what actually happens inside an air fryer.
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The test is impressively simple - the YouTuber opens up the air fryer and puts a large LED light and a lens-up GoPro action camera into the tray.
They add some tortilla slices to see if they move about while being cooked, then close the device up and set it to as low a temperature as they can.
The video is pretty fascinating. A coiled heating element provides, you guessed it, the heat, while a large fan is working behind it to distribute heat around the compartment. The tray the food sits on also has many holes, which creates a lot of circulation to 'air fry' the food.
The camera is only inside the air fryer for a short period - so it's not damaged - but it's long enough to clearly show how it all works, and people are quick to praise the video.
In its comments section, one person wrote: "I’m so glad you did this because I really wanted to know what it looked like inside. I’m glad everything is OK!"
Another viewer said: "THIS. THIS IS WHAT I WANTED TO KNOW. Thank you".
This is a great example of where YouTube can be fantastic - a simple little video like this can provide a way clearer explanation of how a piece of technology works than a long Wikipedia article or written explainer.
The only thing left to mention is those tortilla wedges - sadly, with the GoPro pointed upwards, we don't see them again, which suggests that the air circulation isn't so strong that it could lift them up and around.
