Are we stuck in an air fryer rut? An unlikely duo will inspire you out of yours

It feels like every home has an air fryer now. We’ve all mastered the crispy chips, the emergency fish fingers from frozen, and some of us have even attempted a baked potato. But honestly, most of us have been cooking exactly the same five things for months.

So, it's official: even if you own one of the best air fryers, you might have found yourself in a rut. This finally clicked when I was Christmas shopping at Bicester Village. In the middle of my slightly frantic present-buying, I wandered over to the brand-new Fortnum & Mason outpost, their first UK store outside London. Next to it was something even more intriguing: Fortnum’s first ever ‘On the Go’ kiosk, handing out warm, handmade sourdough crumpets topped with the most British-but-bougie flavours imaginable.

I ordered one, immediately asked for the recipes, and walked away thinking: I’m absolutely making these at home. But I didn’t reach for a frying pan or oven. I took them straight to the new Salter Air Fryer Oven, pulled out my air fryer accessories, and that’s where things got interesting.

Creative cooking in the Salter XL Air Fryer

The reason these recipes became my route out of the air fryer funk is because they do exactly what I needed. Crumpets are a classic, but they had been reimagined into an air-fryer playground. Here's how you can use them to get out of your rut too.

Fortnum & Mason’s toppings are joyfully extra and they kindly shared how you can recreate them. Think coronation chicken with mango chutney, ham hock with mustard and crispy potato straws, and a Brie-and-seasonal-fruit moment. Underneath all the luxury is a simple truth: crumpets are the perfect for what to cook in an air fryer.

The crumpet recipes

Crumpets toast quickly, toppings reheat beautifully, and the Salter’s divider system lets you prep multiple elements at once. That’s what pushed me out of my rut: you suddenly realise you’re basically running a tiny restaurant inside an appliance.

You can see in the image above that I placed a divider into the middle of the air fryer to slowly toast my crumpets, whilst cooking the different elements of the recipes on a higher heat.

Here’s how I tackled each flavour, using the air fryer to simplify the steps.

Coronation Chicken Crumpet

Inspired by Fortnum & Mason’s warm curry, coriander & mango chutney crumpet I cooked the chicken in one half of the air fryer, letting the top and bottom heating elements crisp the skin before dicing.

On the other side, I toasted coconut chips and puffed wild rice (it works surprisingly well in small batches). While everything rested, I mixed a cheat’s coronation sauce: cream cheese, curry powder, chopped coriander stalks and a spoon of mango chutney.

After 20 minutes of prep work, I bought everything together to assemble on a toasted crumpet, added the crunchy garnishes, and suddenly, I had made something brunch-worthy. It spurred me on to make the next recipe.

Ham, Egg & Chips Crumpet

Comforting, hearty, and ideal for testing the Salter’s multitasking, I was the most excited for this flavour. Whilst you could cook a joint of ham in here, I wanted to go for a lighter flavour, so I used shredded ham, warmed in the air fryer as I cut potatoes into straw-thin chips and cooked them on the other side using the Salter’s higher heat zone.

Fortnum and Mason's recipe used an egg, but I wanted to warm up some beans and mushy peas to pour over the crumpet. I used my deeper silicone trays to sit these at the bottom of the air fryer whilst the chips finished cooking and, within five minutes, they were ready to go.

Once they were done, I piled everything on a toasted crumpet with mustard, ketchup and pickles. It’s salty, crispy, soft, sharp: everything you want in a winter lunch.

Brie & Cranberry Crumpet

A festive take on Fortnum’s umami-rich truffle & brie version, this was one the final recipe that I tested in the air fryer. Brie goes on a tray on the top shelf until just melting, whilst the cranberry sauce warms underneath like the mushy peas and beans on my other ham recipe.

I popped the crumpet in for a quick grill and heat up, then: stacked, toasted, and ate immediately. This one convinced me that air fryers are basically cheat-mode for fancy snacks.

Moving on to baking a cake in the Salter XL Air Fryer

People never believe me when I say this, but cakes do beautifully in air fryers, especially one with the space of the Salter when the central divider is removed. It's a reminder that one of the most common air fryer annoyances people have when they buy one of these appliances is that the capacity is limited. The Salter can do both small and big batches of baking, so it avoids lots of problems that people often come to me with.

Back to the backing. I placed an apple cake batter into a small tin, set it on the lowest shelf and let the hot air circulate. In 20 minutes, I was peering through the clear door at a perfectly domed, golden cake with a crisp Demerara-sugar top.

The edges caramelise more deeply than in a traditional oven, which is exactly what you want from an apple cake.

A one-tray trick for roasting in the Salter XL Air Fryer

I roast gnocchi and vegetables for my dinner at least once a week, thanks to The Roasting Tin recipe book. In my main oven, it usually takes 30 minutes, but in the Salter XL Air Fryer Oven, it only needed 20.

The process is really simple. I spread out boiled gnocchi with mushrooms, butternut squash, chestnuts, sage and a bulb of garlic. The gnocchi browned, the mushrooms softened and the sage crisped. The only thing needing a tweak was the squash, which works best cut smaller than the oven-sized chunks I had prepped. That's not the fault of the Salter XL Air Fryer, because I've had this in other models. Unless you cook low and slow roasts, you don't get the depth of super soft cooking.

It’s one of the easiest ways to feel like you’ve cooked properly without actually putting in the effort.

Covering the classics, but faster in the Salter XL Air Fryer

Now, we move onto my classic tests, the first of which is fish fingers and chips. I had already seen the Salter XL Air Fryer nail the finer French fry test, so I made chunkier wedges.

I gave these a head start in the air fryer, cooking them for 10 minutes in the oven, on two trays, before adding in the frozen fish fingers for another fifteen minutes.

Whilst both cooked well and had lovey, crisp results, I noticed that, as with a conventional ovens there is some variability in the heat transfer across the oven. The trays on the underneath were notably lighter and softer than the ones on top. In some homes, that could work to your advantage: there will be crispy and soft chips available for every different preference. In my tests, I would have loved to see consistency across all the layers, but the difference is probably only another few minutes in the air fryer, which is all the time it takes to lay the table.

Roasting vegetables in the Salter XL Air Fryer Oven

The gnocchi test covers an element of this in that the roasted vegetable test looks for consistent roasting across a large tray, with potentially a bit more humidity than your ready-made meals.

I chopped up onion, courgette, mushroom, aubergine, and peppers. All of them got a good coating of olive oil with some salt and pepper too. After 20 minutes, the tips were perfectly charred, then onion still had some bite, but enough tenderness and sweetness to tell me that the Salter had nailed my test.

Making pizza and reheating in the Salter XL Air Fryer

You can see that I had to have and do some tray-tetris to get my full 12” pizza on the tray to cook for dinner. In any other air fryer, I would have needed to cut this into slices, so halves is almost a win. For an air fryer oven, it’s worth noting, because some models can fit a whole pizza without any tinkering. Nonetheless, on the first round of cooking, this achieved the perfect pizza. I had doughy, puffed-up, airy crusts, stringy cheese, and a crisp base. I couldn’t ask for anything better.

The next test is my re-heat, where I take what pizza I managed to stop the vultures in my family from picking at and I give it a warm up for ten minutes. In most air fryers, this is pretty standard, but I was surprised to see this standing when it came out of the air fryer. I took a tentative nibble and it was piping hot. The air fryer hadn’t dried it out of oven cooked the pizza in any places, it had just done an amazing job of getting this hot.

Cleaning the Salter XL Air Fryer

After a day of enthusiastic experimenting (and an embarrassing amount of snacking), I was dreading the washing up. Then I read the magic words: the accessories are dishwasher-safe.

A quick wipe of the door and touch panel was all that remained. For something with this much capacity, that’s a huge win. And, if you're still keen to get a deep clean, we've got plenty of tips on how to clean an air fryer.

How does the Salter XL Air Fryer oven compare?

I have been an advocate for air fryer ovens ever since I tested the Breville Halo Flexi Oven. It’s a little smaller than the Salter and also has some nifty storage containers and slightly clearer instructions.

So, if you need a space-efficient oven that keeps things tidy, the Breville should be in the running. On the flip side, the capacity can be limiting and there’s a notable reduction in the accessories and extras that you have at the tips of your fingers, so you can’t do your rotisserie chicken or kebabs like you might have liked to in the Salter.

So, should you buy the Salter XL Air Fryer Oven?

If you want an appliance that actively encourages you to get creative, not just reheat, this is a brilliant option.

The Breville Halo Flexi Oven still wins on compact design and storage, but the Salter’s capacity, divider, trays and accessories open up far more possibilities. You can genuinely cook meals, not just snacks.

And in my case, it helped me break out of my air-fryer monotony, one Fortnum-inspired crumpet at a time.