Stop crowding the basket, it's not a convection oven trick

Honestly, I keep seeing people pile wings or fries in until they're touching, then complaining about soggy results. I ran a side by side test last Tuesday with 6 pieces versus 12 pieces of chicken thigh in my 5 quart unit. The 6 piece batch came out crisp all over in 18 minutes, the 12 piece batch took 26 minutes and still had steamed spots underneath. Air needs room to move, period. Has anyone else done a proper portion test, or are we all just guessing on capacity?

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derek_perez26d ago

Wait, have you actually tried rotating the basket halfway through? That was the game changer for me. I did the same test with frozen wings, 10 versus 5, and the small batch was done way faster with zero steaming. But I found that even with 10, if I shook them every 6 minutes and split the cook time, they came out almost as good. Still took longer, but the sogginess went away. My guess is most people just dump everything in and walk away, which is the real issue here.