Vegetables
Peppers
Mostly water in a waxy skin, so they blister and collapse rather than crisping.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
A pepper is a thin wall of high-water flesh behind a waxy cuticle. The cuticle resists moisture loss until it blisters, at which point the flesh collapses and releases a lot of water into a small chamber — which is why peppers alongside something meant to be crisp will sabotage it. The sugars are high, so the blistered patches caramelise fast and the edges go from sweet to bitter quickly at 200°C.
Why the cut matters
Peppers cook quickly and never become crisp, which is worth saying because a reader expecting an air fryer to crisp everything will read a soft blistered pepper as a failure. It is what a cooked pepper is.
Cooking pages
- Pepper chunks — Inch chunks, fifteen minutes at 200°C. They blister; they do not crisp.
- Pepper quarters — Six to nine minutes on direct heat, skin side down.
- Stuffed vegetables — Ten minutes at 160°C — the lowest air-fry temperature for anything savoury in the catalogue.
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.