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AirfryerHQ

Shellfish

Prawns

The fastest food in the catalogue: four minutes, 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. Every chart read this sprint puts them between four and eight minutes, which in this appliance means the difference between one setting and the next is most of the cooking time.

Cooking pages

  • Prawns — Four minutes at 180°C for 450g. The shortest cook in the catalogue.
  • Frozen tempura prawns — Nine to ten minutes at 190°C from frozen, which is twice as long as a bare prawn.

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.