Shellfish
Prawns
Among the fastest foods in the catalogue, and thirty seconds too long is rubber.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
Prawn muscle sets at a low temperature and then keeps contracting, squeezing out water and turning the texture rubbery. There is no fat and almost no connective tissue to slow that down. The shape helps a little — a prawn curls as it cooks, which is a visible doneness signal most foods do not give you — and the surface browns readily because of the sugars and proteins in the shell and the residual coating.
Why the cut matters
Prawns cook faster than anything else an air fryer is used for, and the failure is not undercooking. Several charts we have read put them between four and eight minutes, not all of them saying what state the prawns are in, which in this appliance means the difference between one setting and the next is most of the cooking time.
Cooking pages
- Prawns — Fresh prawns get sixteen to twenty minutes at 180°C in the one table that names a state; other tables print four to ten minutes and name none.
- Frozen tempura prawns — Nine to ten minutes at 190°C from frozen, which is twice as long as a bare prawn.
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.