Seriously though, what's the usual lifecycle for those waste oil tanks? Will the owner sell the contents to a recycler when it's full?
This is an organized crime thing, apparently there's a chinese mob?
These people were stealing oil from restaurants and selling it to downstream users for industrial uses (making biodiesel is one)
Google suggests at about $0.5 per gallon
I'm not sure what the restaurant gets paid for it, probably not a lot, they may even have to pay for the service like they do for trash dumpsters. But unlike trash, the oil has a value so they probably do get paid a little bit.
They are also legally required to dispose of waste cooking oil properly. It's not toxic per se, but you can't just dump it down the drain.
That's what the gutter is for: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zrv78nG9R04
The search keyword is the day is "fatberg".
The broader TLRD is there's no market for gutter oil for cooking anymore when UCO sell more to industrial recyclers. Gutter oil for cooking in PRC, TW disapeared once waste cooking oil recycling industries sprung up. I think SKR avoided it all together by building biodesel management earlier.
Some things require a fryer. The point is that there is a 1:1 correspondence between what can cook in an oil fryer versus what can cook in an air fryer, and the result is 85% as crisp.
In fact I hold the oil against the restaurant because the oil is a multi-faceted health hazard.
EDIT: So to be clear, yes, there is a narrow use case for people who can't afford e.g. a good countertop convection oven (same thing as an air fryer but more versatile) or decent convection oven, and for whom cooking consists mostly of store-bought and pre-cooked small meals for 1-2 people max, and definitely for people that don't care about the dramatic textural difference from actual fried food, or that aren't attempting to emulate fried food with it.
But air frying was mentioned by GP as an alternative for restaurants in place of deep frying, which is woefully out of touch with the most basic facts of reality.
Chris Young, of Modernist Cuisine and Chefsteps fame, disagrees with you. There’s a difference in the physical construction of actual air fryers vs just fast convection ovens. Every convection oven/air fryer combo I’ve ever seen has the fan on the side, so the behavior and performance is different.
It isn't clear to me that it matters if a fan is on the side or below or sucks or blows, because with sufficient speed you get turbulence, and air is flowing in all sorts of directions. The claim doesn't pass a basic physics smell test, nor does the video's claim about blowing from the side "fighting the natural tendency of steam to rise", which is only relevant if your fan is seriously under-powered. Also, where does that steam go? It is just re-circulated, unless the oven is properly vented, which is the real factor here. You only get "pockets of humidity" in a really trash convection oven or if you seriously over-crowd your food, or in bad "energy-efficient" ovens that maintain efficiency by just trapping steam. Could it be that the average / cheap convection oven is poorly vented and has an underpowered fan, relative to the average air-fryer? Probably. But I remain unconvinced they are meaningfully different from a decent convection oven.
Part of the reason I don't believe the claims is that I use the technique in the video already to make very crisp oven fries that approach the ones in the video even in a non-convection, regular oven. Getting this right was an obsession for me for some time, and the trick is getting the par-cook perfect, not over-shaking, the right kind of potatoes, the stupid amounts of oil (which effectively causes the outsides to fry anyway and properly crisp), and the right oven temp. You do regularly have to also toss them in the oven, just like he regularly shakes his in the fryer. Getting all those things right is the main trick here, and is very, very hard to do right, probably about 90% of the challenge. In fact, getting the par-cook wrong can even make a deep-fried fry worse than a properly par-cooked and prepared oven fry, and knowing the importance of all these other factors, I find it incredibly implausible that the different direction of convection in an air-fryer is a significant factor.
Perhaps a regular oven can get you to only 80%, a convection to 90%, and an air-fryer to 100% of what he achieves, and perhaps this is because the air fryer makes it less work and more consistent, since you can toss them with less overall heat loss. Or perhaps if he spent just as many weeks perfecting convection oven fries they would be indistinguishable. The side-by-side comparison with a convection oven is what I need to see to be actually convinced an air-fryer is anything unique, and weak and untested arguments about air-flow direction aren't doing it for me.
EDIT: Also I originally stated "Air-fryers are just small ovens, they do not meaningfully crisp almost anything without serious modifications to the recipe and approach, and most crispy textures can only be properly achieved by deep frying", and note that this remains true. Yes, a good chef can achieve crisp in clever ways other than deep or shallow frying, and I have my own bag of tricks, but in practice it is a lot harder, less consistent, only works for a very limited number of foods, and still generally requires you use a large amount of oil.
EDIT2: If you read through the YouTube comments on that video, you also find out he is using frozen fries, which he admits are almost always par-fried in oil anyway! So the recipe was still relying on deep-frying!
Fwiw, one can always spray oil before placing an item in the air fryer, although it's entirely unnecessary from a cooking pov.
alecco•1mo ago