Where I live in the Netherlands, people love their fried food. Pommes frites (frieten, french fries, chips, etc.) and numerous sorts of encrusted mystery meats and fried sausages. I’m not so much a fried food person and never have been, so I have never really understood this concept.

I remember on one of my earliest trips to the Netherlands at a campground and winning a deep fryer in a bingo game — the grand prize. I happily swapped it for a cheap first-aid kit that someone else had won — way more useful. The woman who I swapped with was over-the-moon with thanking me, and I actually felt a bit guilty for probably giving her and her family cardiovascular disease.

After many years here now, at one point, I finally gave in and got a deep fryer. I hated it. I hated the smell, I hated the grease it left all over, and most of all, I hated leaving old grease in a pan with food particles floating around. Let’s be realistic, who empties one of those after each use, when you need to replace it with liters of oil — nobody. And don’t even get me started about cleaning them. Even the most expensive that promise you can wash them in the dishwasher are a disgusting mess!

So anyway, I was online searching the other night for mittens and scarves, and just for the heck of it threw the Actifry Mini on my list so I could check it out more later. At the same moment, my computer re-booted for a software update and when I came back online the website store informed me that they were also in the middle of a rebuild. Low and behold, we received an Actifry Mini this week, along with 3 sets of mittens and scarves!

I’m not big on having a lot of appliances in the kitchen — just more stuff to clean and keep working! I also was not really inspired about what I read about this being like an expensive loud hair dryer to fry food. One person told some rather funny stories about it catching on fire. Nevertheless, as long as I would have to return it anyway, I thought I would take the opportunity and give it a try first.

Here in the Netherlands, we only have about 10 days to return things. They also don’t like you to return things used, but I had the error message from their website and thought it was my “duty” to give this a go while I had the chance. Since I don’t have a lot of food around that is suitable for frying, I stuck to the basics of what we would use it for, namely — fries.

I only had the frozen sort around, so gave it a go with them. Overall, I have to say, we were both very impressed with the results. It was not nearly as loud as I thought it would be, and the frites came out crispy and tasting nice. You need to do them a bit longer than they say, and it took about 25 minutes, but overall we were very pleased with the results. I like that this seems healthy, and tablespoon of oil is enough for most things. No oil was needed for the frozen fries.

As they say, “There’s a sucker born every minute”… It’s a keeper! It seems to be made well. The inside pan is a bit thin, but hopefully it will not wear out too soon. It’s easy to use, and although I would not want to leave it unattended, it seems safe. What I like is that everything is not soaking in oil and it does not stink up the whole house. And the best part is that it is definitely easy to clean. For us, the “mini” version is the right size, but I don’t think it would work for more than 2-3 people for fries.

I kind of screwed up and threw some cheese souffle thingee’s (encrusted mystery cheese) in at the last moment, which I would not recommend if you do not want a congealed mess of fries and encrusted cheese thingee’s. Like most of the websites warned, this is best suited for fries (on their own) or round food, because the spatula thing kind of macerates it together. I’ll be trying to figure out ways to do round fish-n-chips in this thing at some point.

So here are some pictures if any of you are curious. I included the normal sized peppers so you have an idea about the size — it’s rather small, especially compared with the original Actifry’s. I will take some more “after” pictures when the fries don’t have cheese souffle thingee’s macerated into them: