Settling The Debate: Can You Safely Use Aluminum Foil In An Air Fryer?

Some questions have more than one legitimate answer. "Can I drive over the speed limit?" you might ask. You can, yes — but in a legal sense, you can't. "Are reciprocating saws made of evil?" Yes, but not only evil. And what about "Can you safely use aluminum foil in an air fryer?" To put it succinctly: Yes, you can ... but no, you can't, and don't do it.

Safety mavens will tell you that safety is not a roll of the dice because you can improve your odds of having a good outcome. This is a misunderstanding of probability. You're still rolling the dice — just bigger dice. You can use aluminum foil in your air fryer without setting anything on fire dozens, maybe thousands of times. There are other risks, as well, and none of them are particularly likely. But the people who know the most about it, or have a lot to lose if something goes wrong, will tell you that none of them are improbable, either.

Fire is often the most likely danger when it comes to cooking appliances, and so it is with air fryers. Recalls of air fryers aren't uncommon — there have been 41 in the past three years — and they're generally temperature-related, as you'd expect. After all, temperatures in the cooking compartment can approach 500 degrees. Some problems, like air fryers that have caught fire when left plugged in while not in use, aren't related to the use of foil. But manufacturers like Maytag, Frigidaire, Philips, and Whirlpool generally agree that using foil (and even apartment paper) in an air fryer can obstruct airflow and cause the unit to overheat. Like other air fryer manufacturers, Cosori (which itself had two million fryers recalled due to fire and burn dangers) makes models that automatically turn themselves off when they overheat.

While simple overheating might be stemmed by such a safety mechanism, manufacturers and others warn that using aluminum foil in an air fryer has a second means of starting a fire: making contact with the fryer's heating element. This can happen if you use foil to catch drips without weighting it down. The forced convection within the fryer can lift it up and deposit it on the heating element, resulting in melted aluminum foil (as also happens with standard ovens) and potentially fire. Contrarians will tell you that it's unlikely a home cooking device will reach temperatures high enough to melt or burn foil, but manufacturers like Philips disagree.

Overheating an air fryer is bad in a couple of ways besides outright fire. One is the possibility of receiving a serious burn, which can happen while you're operating the fryer normally. There are reports of this happening in the Consumer Product Safety Commission database, but none specifically linking burns to the use of aluminum foil. Nonetheless, it's a known problem with countertop air fryers, and since manufacturers agree that foil can cause the units to overheat, it seems worthwhile to consider the possibility a risk. Another problem that crops up occasionally with toaster oven-style models is exploding glass doors. While one CPSC report links an exploding door to the use of foil, there's no indication that the foil was used in a way that might have contributed. In fact, instructions for countertop air fryers are often different from those for ovens with air-frying capabilities. These instructions generally indicate that it's acceptable to use foil to line a tray or baking sheet on the rack below your air fryer basket, but not to directly line the air fryer basket or the bottom of the oven, and it's a dangerous mistake to allow contact between aluminum foil and a heating element.

Even after all this, maybe you're not concerned. Perhaps your motto is the age-old idiom of "You pays your money and you takes your chances." Still, there's another big reason to avoid using aluminum foil in your air fryer, and it's not safety-related at all: Rather, it can prevent your food from achieving that crispy fried-ness that you're using it for in the first place, by restricting airflow within the cooking chamber. Airflow is what makes an air fryer special, and without it, you're simply sticking those chicken wings in a toaster.