Why this site exists

The problem

Search for how long to air fry chicken breast and you get nine recipe posts and one chart. The recipe posts bury the number under a story, a jump-to-recipe button and an ingredient list. You did not want a recipe. You wanted a number, and you are standing in a kitchen holding a phone.

Worse, most of those numbers are uncited. Somebody wrote 22 minutes once, and it has been copied between sites ever since without anyone checking where it came from.

The method

Every food page here works the same way, and the rules are deliberately narrow:

1. Every number has a named source. Not "experts recommend" — a publisher, a document and a URL, with the date we last checked that the page still said what we say it says. Currently that means Cosori, Ninja (SharkNinja UK), FoodSafety.gov (USDA, FDA, CDC), USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, Instant Brands.
2. Safety figures come from one place and are never converted. Safe minimum internal temperatures are taken verbatim from FoodSafety.gov (USDA, FDA, CDC), including the published Celsius value. We round cooking temperatures to the nearest 5 °C because that is how dials are marked; we do not do that to a safety floor, because 160 °F rounds down to 70 °C when the chart says 71.
3. Disagreement is published, not resolved. Cosori and Ninja differ by 75 °F on steak. Ninja runs bacon hotter than an oven; Cosori runs it 40 degrees cooler. Those pages show both, because the disagreement is more useful than a false average.
4. If a food cannot be sourced, it is left out. There are foods missing from this index that get far more searches than some of the ones on it. They are missing because we have not found a source we trust.
5. Ranges, not single numbers. The USDA is explicit that cook times vary with the size and power of the machine. A single figure would imply a precision that does not exist.

What we found that surprised us

No manufacturer and no food agency publishes a conversion formula. The "reduce by 25 °F and 20%" rule that the entire internet repeats has no official author. The most authoritative statement of it we could find is University of Illinois Extension, which puts it at 25 to 30 °F — already a range before anyone started rounding it. That research is written up in the 25-degree rule.

Who writes it, and what I am not

Christian Weber. One person, not a content team, which is why the index grows slowly and why every entry reads like somebody wrote it rather than generated it.

Most food sites open with a story about the author's kitchen. Mine would not tell you anything useful, so here is the more relevant disclosure instead: I am not a chef, I do not run a test kitchen, and I have not personally cooked every one of these 56 foods to verify its timing. Anybody claiming otherwise about an index this size is either running a commercial test facility or telling you a story.

What I have done is read the manufacturers' own cook charts, cross-checked them against each other, taken every safety figure from the government body that publishes it, and written down where each number came from and when I last checked it. That is a librarian's job rather than a cook's, and for the question you actually arrived with — how long, at what temperature — I think it produces a better answer than one person's kitchen ever could.

Where the site makes a judgement call that is not sourced — how much a small basket runs ahead of a standard one, for instance — the page says so in those words rather than dressing it up as data. You will find that sentence on the converter. It is there because the alternative is pretending to a precision nobody has.

The photographs are illustrations, generated to match what each page describes. They are not documentary photographs of food I cooked, and I would rather say that here than have you assume otherwise.

Why bother

Search for how long to air fry chicken breast and nine of the top ten results are recipe posts. You wanted a number and you got a story, a jump-to-recipe button and an ingredient list. Worse, most of those numbers are uncited — somebody wrote 22 minutes once and it has been copied between sites ever since.

So the test for every page here is narrow: could you act on it while standing in a kitchen holding a phone, and can you check where the number came from? If a page fails either half, it is wrong, however well it reads.

What is here

• 56 foods, each with a sourced temperature, time range and turn point.
• 13 guides, around 14,000 words, all cited.
• A converter that treats °C as a real unit rather than a relabelled °F.
• No signup, no newsletter wall, no life story before the number.

Corrections

If a number here is wrong, we want to know — particularly a safety number. Sources get updated and pages get revised, and every citation carries the date we last checked it so you can see how stale it might be. Get in touch.

How it is funded

Fryndex intends to carry display advertising. It carries none today. When it does, ads will be clearly marked, kept out of the way of the numbers, and will never influence which foods are listed or what temperature is given. See the privacy policy for what that means for your data.

The limits

Cook times are a starting point, not a guarantee. Your machine is not the machine the manufacturer tested. The one thing that makes air frying meat genuinely reliable is a thermometer, and no amount of sourcing on our part substitutes for it. Please read the disclaimer — it is short and it means what it says.