An air fryer oven sounds useful, but before you buy one, ask one practical question: What will you actually use it for?
It’s easy to think of an air fryer as the appliance you pull out for crispy fries or chicken wings. But an air fryer oven can do quite a bit more. Depending on the size and design, it can handle everything from roasting vegetables to reheating pizza, baking small dishes, and making toast.
If you’re considering adding one to your kitchen, here are five everyday foods that are surprisingly easy to make in an air fryer oven.
1. Chicken Wings and Other Small Cuts of Chicken
Chicken wings are probably one of the first foods people associate with air frying, and for good reason.
The circulating hot air helps brown and crisp the outside while keeping the cooking process relatively simple. You don’t need a deep fryer full of oil, and you don’t have to heat up a full-size oven for a smaller batch.
But wings aren’t the only option. Chicken tenders, drumsticks, thighs, and other smaller cuts can also work well in an air fryer oven.
The biggest advantage for everyday cooking is convenience. When you’re making dinner for one or two people, heating a large oven can feel like more work than the meal itself. A countertop appliance can make a smaller cooking job much easier to manage.
2. Roasted Vegetables
If you normally roast vegetables in the oven, an air fryer oven can make the same type of side dish feel much less complicated.
Broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, carrots, zucchini, and bell peppers are all good candidates. Toss them with a little oil and your favorite seasonings, spread them out on a tray or in the basket, and let the hot air do the work.
The result is different from simply steaming vegetables. You can get browned edges and a little crispiness while the inside stays tender.
This is also one of those everyday uses that can make an appliance earn its counter space. You don’t have to save the air fryer for special meals. It can become the appliance you reach for when you need a quick vegetable side on a weeknight.
3. Pizza, Toast, and Open-Faced Sandwiches
An air fryer oven can also be surprisingly useful for foods that you might normally make in a toaster oven.
A few slices of pizza, toast, garlic bread, or an open-faced sandwich usually don’t require much cooking space. Instead of turning on a full-size oven, you can use a countertop appliance to heat or crisp a smaller portion.
This is where the oven-style design can make a difference. Unlike a small basket air fryer, an air fryer oven typically gives you a flat cooking surface, making it easier to work with foods that don’t fit naturally into a basket.
For anyone comparing the two appliances, it’s worth thinking beyond air frying alone. The question isn’t simply whether an air fryer can cook crispy food. It’s also whether it can handle the other small oven jobs you already do.
If you’re wondering about that distinction, it may also help to look at whether an air fryer can replace a toaster oven before deciding which type of appliance makes sense for your kitchen.
4. Small Casseroles and Baked Dishes
This may be one of the less obvious uses for an air fryer oven. With enough interior space, an oven-style air fryer can accommodate a small baking dish, allowing you to make things like baked pasta, roasted potatoes, small casseroles, or other dishes that would normally go into an oven.
Of course, the available space varies significantly between models. A compact appliance may be great for one or two servings but too small for a family-sized casserole.
That’s why capacity is something worth considering before buying. A larger countertop model, such as the Nuwave Bravo XL Pro, is designed for people who want more cooking room than a traditional basket-style air fryer provides.
You don’t necessarily need the largest model available. The better question is what you regularly cook. If your meals tend to be small and simple, a compact model may be enough. If you often cook larger portions or want to use baking dishes and trays, extra interior space can be much more useful.
5. Cookies and Other Small Baked Goods
You might not think of an air fryer as a baking appliance, but an air fryer oven can handle many small baking jobs.
Cookies are a good example. If you only want to bake a small batch, using a countertop appliance can be more practical than preheating a large oven.
The same idea applies to other small baked goods. Depending on the appliance and recipe, you can experiment with things like biscuits, muffins, or small pastries.
The key word here is small. An air fryer oven isn’t necessarily going to replace a full-size oven when you’re preparing several trays of cookies for a party. But for a small batch on an ordinary afternoon, it can be a convenient alternative.
What Makes an Air Fryer Oven Different?
The biggest difference between a traditional basket air fryer and an air fryer oven is the way you can use the cooking space.
A basket-style air fryer is excellent for foods that can be shaken or arranged in a single basket. An oven-style model gives you a more familiar cooking setup, with trays or racks that can accommodate a wider variety of foods.
That doesn’t automatically make one better than the other. It depends on what you cook and how much space you have.
Before buying, think about the meals you make most often. Do you mainly want crispy chicken and vegetables? Or would you also like to toast bread, reheat pizza, roast a tray of vegetables, bake a small dish, or cook several servings at once?
Those everyday questions are often more useful than simply looking at how many cooking functions an appliance has.
Is an Air Fryer Oven Worth the Counter Space?
An air fryer oven can be useful precisely because it isn’t limited to one type of food.
If you only use it occasionally for fries, wings, or frozen snacks, you may not need a large model. But if it can take over some of the smaller jobs you normally do with a toaster oven or full-size oven, it may become a much more useful part of your kitchen routine.
Before buying, look at the interior dimensions as well as the advertised capacity. Think about whether your usual baking dishes, pizza, trays, or portions will actually fit.
In the end, the most useful appliance isn’t necessarily the one with the longest list of features. It’s the one that fits naturally into the way you already cook.
And if you can use the same countertop appliance for crispy chicken on Monday, roasted vegetables on Wednesday, pizza on Friday, and a small batch of cookies on the weekend, that’s a pretty good indication that it won’t spend most of its life sitting unused on the counter.
