And at what temperature?
I think of air dryers as mini convection ovens. they just call them dryers because Burger brains like fried food so much. with convection, it's the same principle, faster consistent baking due to air movement homogenizing the air temps. and I want to say the rule of thumb for convection vs conventional bake times is like 25% reduced for convection.
I don't really have tips for crisping the outside of boiled potatoes. I would imagine short duration at very high temp, because as you heat the potatoes, the moisture inside is escaping outward and preventing it from drying. so it's more like you are trying to sear the outside, like they do with meat on a grille.... very short, localized heat at very high temp.
or like the last 5 minutes of baking a bread loaf with a thick crust, where you crank the already high temp up 20-50% to get the browning aka "maillard" effect you are looking for with a thick crust.
I've never tried what you are doing but I bet it can be done and will be well worth it.
My conclusion was that the air fryer, at least the one I have, just doesn't get hot enough to get the effect I want. Doing this same process with the final step in a pan with a little oil works extremely well, though: boil with salt and vinegar, drain, toss in spices and oil, and fry on medium-high heat (hot enough that vegetable oil starts putting out little wisps of smoke, but not hot enough that it actually starts smoking) turning regularly until they look done, which gets the texture both inside and out perfect in a way that is frustratingly hard to get with sweet potatoes. I guess my next experiment would be trying to bake them for a short time at 450 or so in a real oven to see if that'll do it, because 400 just wasn't enough to get the outside good without messing up the internal consistency.
I will say boiling the wedges/sticks like this and then using the air fryer is still better than just baking them directly from raw, even though I wasn't fully satisfied with the results. It's just using a pan instead of the air fryer worked better.
nicely done. I do something similar with dumplings. it's so easy to steam them with rice in a rice cooker, but they don't have the excitement of fried, the texture, etc.
so I steam them and when they're done, I dump them in a pan with just a bit of coconut oil on medium-high for maybe a minute or so, until they brown, then transfer them to a plate to pat any oil off and let them sit for another minute or so.
zero guesswork, minimal effort, pan full of "fries" dumplings.
I don't have any exact figures to give you but I have discovered that taking fries out and letting them rest for a couple minutes before putting them back in for a little while definitely crisped them up.
Experiment 1 - 5 minutes at 400 degrees: nope, not even a little bit browned or crisped outside. Tried one, and it was still good because it had been boiled for 10 minutes in a salt and vinegar brine and lightly tossed in garlic, ginger, salt, and pepper, but the texture was 100% that of a lightly boiled potato.
Experiment 1b - 5 more minutes at 400 degrees, same batch: a little browning in spots, still squishy outside, getting too soft inside. Do air fryers just suck? Like my impression has always been that they're just shitty little ovens for people who want an oven to work like a microwave, and this experiment is just reinforcing this expectation so far.
Experiment 1c - 5 more minutes, same temperature, same batch: no change, they're just getting drier and floppier. This thing sucks, why does anyone use this over a real oven or stove.
Experiment 2 - 10 minutes at 400 degrees: meh, it's better but still inferior to frying them in a pan. That's the last of the fries I had prepared, so no more experiments right now.
