Vegetables
Aubergine
A sponge that drinks whatever oil it is given, and one of the vegetables air frying most improves.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
Raw aubergine flesh is a porous, air-filled structure — closer to a sponge than to a solid — and that structure is why it soaks up oil in a pan. In hot moving air the air pockets collapse under heat rather than filling with fat, and the flesh goes creamy while the cut faces brown. The skin is tough and stays that way. Undercooked aubergine is unpleasant in a specific way — squeaky and bitter — so this is a vegetable where the longer end of the range is usually the right one.
Why the cut matters
Aubergine in a pan absorbs an extraordinary amount of oil. In an air fryer it does not, which makes this one of the clearest cases where the appliance produces a genuinely different dish rather than a slightly worse version of a fried one.
Cooking pages
- Aubergine cubes — One manufacturer prints fifteen minutes at 200°C for inch-and-a-half cubes; another grills 5cm pieces for eight to ten. Neither says fresh or frozen.
This page gives no cooking answer of its own. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. Any figure mentioned above is one manufacturer’s, and the page for the cut says which machine, quantity and state it was printed for, or that the manufacturer named no state.