I've been eating low-carb, so when I was cart-plowing through Costco today the chicharrones tasting table caught my attention. Almost no carbs and crunchy with some tang, what's not to like? So a couple of bags came home with me:



I was already planning to cook chicken wings for dinner, so I put some of the chicharrones in the new Vitamix for its maiden run and ended up with this:



I had a dozen mostly-thawed wings to cook. I patted them dry, then split them up. I sprayed half of them with avocado oil, then tossed them in Harry Soo's All-Purpose Rub with MSG. For the other half, I beat an egg with some of the rub, then breaded each wing using the egg first and then the "pork panko" (i.e., ground-up chicharrones). Then they all went into the Cosori Dual Blaze air fryer:



And after 20 minutes at 360 degrees (with no flipping or tossing!), I had this:



This was a quick-and-dirty cook with minimal effort, but both kinds of wings were pretty darned good. I thought the pork worked quite well as breading, I consider that a success. Ultimately I think I like the unbreaded wings as much (or almost as much?) as the breaded wings, so I don't know that it's worth the effort for me personally, but it was good to see that the technique works anyhow.

nice steve, I passed those the other day and was like naw

Might change my mind the next time i go

I'm just here to say that I'm excited about the future of air fryers!

I've raved about my Cosori Dual Blaze, I love that thing with it's dual heating element system which heats from both the top and bottom to (mostly) eliminate the need to flip your food.

Then the Dreo Chef Maker came out a while back. It's $279, and it's a "smart" air fryer with a temp probe that goes into your meat (or other food), so it will automatically do all kinds of wonderful things to your food. I was pretty excited about this one, but the one thing that held me back is that it appears to me that there's not a lot of manual control with the smart cooking modes, so for example it doesn't appear that you can adjust your steak temperature up or down a few degrees.

Now we have the Tastee air fryer, which on the surface doesn't do as much cool stuff as the Chef Maker perhaps, but it still looks pretty amazing . . . and it's $119 with the right discount codes. Check out the video below; she puts it through its paces. She does a TON of air fryer reviews, so she knows her stuff.



I'm not saying that this is the perfect air fryer, because I don't know any more about it. But what I'm saying is that if you're in the market for one today, this one is worth considering . . . and I think we are going to have some pretty awesome choices in a year or two.

Now we just need to get that Dual Blaze lower heating element into one of these smart air fryers.