Prepared and processed foods
Fish cakes
Cooked fish and potato in a crumb, so the only real question is whether the middle got hot before the crumb went dark.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
The crumb behaves like every other factory-applied coating: it already contains oil from the par-fry and crisps in dry moving air with nothing added. The inside is mashed potato and cooked fish — a dense, wet, low-conductivity mixture that heats slowly from the outside in, which is why a fish cake is the convenience food most likely to come out with a perfect crust and a cool centre. Handling is the other failure: the binding is weak until it is hot, so turning one too early breaks it.
Why the cut matters
A fish cake is a manufactured product whose components are already cooked, which puts it in the same family as breaded poultry rather than with fish. It is here because it is one of the few chilled convenience foods with a published air-fryer figure.
Cooking pages
- Fish cakes — Fresh fish cakes get twelve to fifteen minutes at 200°C in one manufacturer's charts for two machines; its chart for a third names no state.
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.