Just realized my mom's old roast chicken recipe works way better in the air fryer

I was digging through my grandma's recipe box last weekend and found her handwritten notes for Sunday roast chicken from 1978. Tried it in my air fryer at 375 for about 35 minutes and the skin came out way crispier than her old oven method ever did. Has anyone else had luck converting older family recipes to air fryer temps and times?

2 comments

2 Comments

wesleypatel20d ago

Hold your horses there. You found a 1978 recipe and now it's some kind of revelation? My mom's roast chicken was never that fancy to begin with. Of course the air fryer makes the skin crispier, that's basically its whole JOB. A convection oven from the 70s wasn't exactly built for crunch. The real question is whether grandma's handwritten note about basting every 20 minutes actually matters in a tiny basket where you can't even open the thing without losing all the heat. I just don't see the big deal about converting something that simple.

the_nina20d ago

Have you ever actually tested that basting thing side by side? I did once on a whim with two identical drumsticks in the same basket and the unbast one came out just as juicy and way crispier. I think the real hidden gem nobody talks about is how a 1978 recipe for chicken probably assumed you were using a whole bird that sat on a rack, not pieces shoved in a bucket. That changes the moisture dynamics completely. And the air fryer's fan is way stronger than those old ovens so it dries the surface out faster anyway. So you might actually be overthinking the basting, but the bigger point is the recipe didn't account for yanking that basket open every few minutes which is a total heat killer.