Urgent air fryer warning to anyone who cooks bacon in one as expert says it’s dangerous

There’s nothing better than a fresh bacon sandwich – just don’t cook it in an air fryer.

Air fryers have become a mainstay on our kitchen counters since they took the world by storm a few years ago, and many of us now rely on the appliance to cook many of the foods we’d normally do in the oven. But a food expert has warned Brits that there’s one common food item you should never cook in an air fryer – bacon.

Dietitian Brenda Peralta explained bacon is extremely fatty, and when you cook bacon in an air fryer, it can lead to an accident in your home and produce unpleasant odors. She told Yahoo: “It is a fatty food, and when it is cooked in an air fryer, the fat can drip down and cause smoke or splatter.”

She added: “This can make the bacon difficult to cook evenly, and it can also produce a lot of smoke and odors.” If you serve bacon that has been cooked unevenly, you run the risk of some parts not cooking all the way through – which could lead to food poisoning.

Air fryers can also become dangerous due to the build-up of bacon grease which leads to smoke. The bacon fat could splatter out across the air fryer’s heating element, causing the gadget to start smoking before a smell of burnt food fills the air. Brenda continued: “A bacon strip is a small and delicate food, and it can be difficult to flip or remove from the air fryer basket without breaking it.”

Another expert said it’s important to wash your air fryer as regularly as you can to avoid putting yourself at risk of food contamination. According to Candess Zona-Mendola, editor of a food safety blog and a paralegal for a food safety law firm, if you make food in a dirty air fryer, and don’t clean “between uses”, you “put yourself at much higher risk of food contamination.”

A version of this story was first published on 1st November 2023.

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