Prepared and processed foods
Pizza
Almost always a reheating problem rather than a cooking one, and it is where air fryers beat microwaves outright.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
A cooked base has already lost its surface moisture once and reabsorbed some from the topping in the fridge. Dry moving air drives that moisture back out and re-crisps the base, while the topping needs only to reach serving temperature. The failure mode is the cheese browning before the base has dried, which is a temperature problem rather than a time one.
Why the cut matters
Pizza appears in this catalogue mainly as a reheating question, which is the use case where an air fryer is unambiguously the best domestic tool: it restores a crisp base that a microwave cannot.
Cooking pages
- Pizza (reheating) — The clearest case where an air fryer beats every other tool in the kitchen.
- Whole frozen pizza — A fit problem before it is a cooking problem, and the answer depends on your appliance.
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.