Prepared and processed foods
Breaded fish products
Engineered to be cooked from frozen, and among the things an air fryer does better than the oven it was designed for.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
The breadcrumb layer is dry and porous and already contains oil from the factory par-fry, so it crisps in moving air with nothing added — which is exactly what an air fryer is good at and exactly what a domestic oven is not. The fish inside is already cooked or part-cooked and is only being brought up to temperature, so the whole exercise is about the crumb. Overcrowding is the failure: the crumb needs air on all sides and a heaped basket steams it.
Why the cut matters
Fish fingers and breaded scampi are manufactured products with a validated cooking method printed on the box, and that method assumes an oven. They are in the catalogue as their own food rather than under white fish because the cooking problem belongs to the coating, not the fish.
Cooking pages
- Fish fingers — Six to ten minutes from frozen at 180–200°C, and better than the oven method on the box.
- Breaded scampi — Nine to fifteen minutes from frozen, and the two published figures disagree by a lot.
- Battered fish fillets — Eleven minutes at 200°C from frozen, published as a single figure rather than a range.
There is deliberately no cooking time on this page. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. That is what the pages above are for.