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 — One manufacturer prints fifteen minutes at 200°C for inch chunks. They blister; they do not crisp.
- Pepper quarters — One manufacturer grills four quartered peppers weighing 750g for six to nine minutes; it does not say fresh or frozen.
- Stuffed vegetables — Ten minutes at 160°C — the lowest air-fry temperature for anything savoury in the catalogue.
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.