How to Clean an Air Fryer

The five-minute routine

There is a version of this job that takes five minutes and a version that takes forty, and the only thing separating them is when you do it. Fat that comes out of food is liquid while the machine is warm. Every subsequent heat cycle drives more of the moisture out of it and polymerises it a little further, until what was a wipe becomes a varnish. Clean it warm and you are wiping up oil. Leave it a week and you are chiselling off a coating.

So, after each cook, once it is cool enough to handle:

1. Unplug it. You are about to put a wet cloth near an element.
2. Lift the crisper plate out of the basket. On most basket models these are two separate pieces, and the gap between them is exactly where grease hides. If you have never separated them, go and look now.
3. Hot water, washing-up liquid, soft sponge. Both pieces, plus the drawer.
4. Wipe the inside of the machine with a damp cloth - walls and the fan grille.
5. Dry everything before it goes back in. Trapped water under a crisper plate will steam your next cook and rust the contact points on a cheaper basket.

Cleaning the basket and the drawer

Nearly every article on this stops at the basket, which is odd, because on a drawer-style air fryer the basket is the part that gets the least dirty. It is perforated. The whole design intent is that fat falls through it. So the fat is not on the basket - it is in the drawer underneath, in a shallow pool that you cannot see unless you take the basket out and look.

That pool is what goes rancid, and rancid fat is what makes a machine smell like old chip shop even though the basket looks spotless. If you clean one thing tonight, clean the drawer.

Baked-on grease: soak, do not scrub

If it has already gone hard and brown, the instinct is to attack it, and that instinct will cost you the basket. Non-stick coating is a thin layer sitting on aluminium. A metal scourer or a scouring pad does not remove the grease from the coating; it removes the coating along with the grease. You will not see much damage the first time. You will see it the third time, when food starts sticking in the exact patches you scrubbed hardest, and from then on that basket is worse than it was before you cleaned it.

Do it the slow way instead, which is faster:

• Soak it. Hot water and washing-up liquid, filled to cover the mess, left for 20-30 minutes. Hot water softens carbonised fat given time - you are letting chemistry do the scrubbing.
• Then baking soda for whatever survives. A thick paste of baking soda and a little water, spread on the stubborn patches, left 15 minutes, worked gently with a soft brush. Baking soda is the right abrasive here precisely because it is a weak one: hard enough to break up carbon, soft enough that it will not score the coating.
• Repeat rather than escalate. A second soak beats a harder scrub every time. Nothing about this is urgent.

The heating element - the bit nobody cleans

Look up into the top of your air fryer. The element is a coil sitting directly above where the food goes, with the fan behind it. Every time you cook something fatty, that fan is driving a fine aerosol of hot fat upwards, and some of it lands on a surface running at several hundred degrees. It does not drip off. It carbonises on contact, in a hard black speckle across the coil.

That build-up is the mechanism behind most of the complaints people blame on the machine. It is why an air fryer that never smoked starts smoking after a few months - the smoke is coming off the element, not the food. It is why tonight's cookies taste faintly of last week's salmon. And no amount of washing the basket touches it, because it is not on the basket.

To do it:

1. Unplug the machine and let it cool completely. Not "mostly cool". The element holds heat.
2. Turn the whole unit upside down, or lay it on its back, so you can see up into the element without craning. This feels wrong the first time and it is entirely fine.
3. Wipe the coil with a damp cloth - damp, wrung out, never dripping. Work along it, not across it.
4. Use a soft-bristled brush (an old toothbrush is ideal) on the carbonised specks. Gently. It is a thin coil and it is not built to take force.
5. Let it dry fully before it goes back on the counter.

Is an air fryer basket dishwasher safe?

Usually yes, and your manual will tell you for certain. But "dishwasher safe" is a claim about whether the part survives, not about whether it survives well. Dishwasher detergent is strongly alkaline - that is how it strips fat without you scrubbing - and repeated cycles of hot alkaline water dull and degrade a non-stick coating considerably faster than hand washing does.

So it is a genuine trade-off rather than a rule: the dishwasher is the convenient clean, and the sink is the better one. Hand washing is what makes the difference between a basket that is still properly non-stick in three years and one that needs oiling to stop eggs welding to it after one.

What never to use

• Steel wool, wire brushes and abrasive scouring pads. They take the coating off with the grease. This is the one that permanently ruins baskets.
• Oven cleaner. It is caustic - designed to dissolve carbon off bare enamelled steel. Non-stick and the aluminium under it are not bare enamelled steel, and there is no way to rinse it out of a machine you cannot submerge.
• Metal utensils in the basket. Not cleaning as such, but it is the same injury - a metal tong scraping the base does what a scourer does, one scratch at a time.
• Aerosol cooking spray, as a routine. Worth knowing because it is a cleaning problem disguised as a cooking one: the lecithin and propellants in cheap spray cans build a sticky, gummy film on non-stick that ordinary washing will not shift, and it gets browner every cook. Toss food in oil in a bowl, or use a refillable pump mister.
• Submerging the main unit. Ever. See above.