Red meat
Lamb
Fatty, strongly flavoured and, like beef, safe to serve pink as a whole cut — which is the part people are unsure about.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
Lamb carries a high proportion of hard external fat that needs sustained heat to render, and it renders faster in moving air than it does in an oven. That fat is both the appliance's advantage here and its problem: the same rendering that crisps the fat cap drips onto the chamber floor and is the commonest source of smoke in the whole catalogue. The meat itself is dense and small-grained, so it moves through its doneness range quickly and a chop goes from pink to grey in about two minutes.
Why the cut matters
Lamb comes into an air fryer mostly as chops and racks, both of which are small enough to suit the appliance and fatty enough to survive it. The confusion worth clearing up is the safety one: a whole cut of lamb is not a food that must be cooked through, and pink lamb is a preference rather than a risk.
Cooking pages
- Lamb chops — Eight to twelve minutes at 200°C for inch-thick chops, and pink is fine.
- Rack of lamb — A 650–900g rack at 190°C for around twenty-two minutes.
- Butterflied leg of lamb — Twenty to twenty-four minutes for a 700g piece — the largest single item charted here.
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.