Ninja chicken

The importers/distributors of the Ninja grills made an astute marketing decision when they managed to get one of their products placed in the Israeli 'Big brother' tv series. I don't watch such programmes but my wife does as do many other Israelis, and the demand for the grills was such that there was a three week month waiting period for them.

We purchased our grill (that has five functions: grill, air fry, bake, roast and dehydrate) a few weeks ago. We haven't done much with it so far: we grilled a few experimental steaks (that I don't eat) and I grilled some chicken breast with honey. Until now, I haven't been too impressed with the machine as it is recommended to grill only two portions at once. Today was a test of a different function: air frying. The test subject was a chicken.

The butcher was somewhat dubious that one could roast a chicken in the ninja (as the chicken would be too large), so we bought a small one. I found a recipe on the Internet that uses the air fry function - I wonder now why not use the roast function as that would seem to be more suitable.

The picture on the left above shows the closed ninja grill; the picture on the right above shows the uncooked chicken placed in the basket. There's plenty of room for some potatoes, had I decided to cook them as well. The recipe says to air fry for 30 minutes, after warming the ninja. The preparatory stage had finished when I took the second picture: the display is showing '[Add] food', so I added the food.

After 30 minutes, I opened the top and turned the chicken over, before air frying it for a further 30 minutes. On the chicken was olive oil and oregano.

The pictue on the above left shows the chicken at 'half time' and the one on the right shows it at 'full time'. The chicken tasted fine although it was somewhat bland (not necessarily a problem; I eat the breast which is always bland). We haven't had roast chicken for quite some time so I don't remember how roasting the chicken in the oven affects the taste.

Conclusions: cooking with the ninja required only 60 minutes as opposed to 90 minutes in the oven. I use the same temperatures (180°C) but the ninja has a smaller volume to heat and so should use less electricity (and of course, the cooking time is much reduced). On the other hand, one does have to clean the baskets in the ninja.

This experiment shows that one can easily roast a chicken in a ninja grill.

Note that I've learnt how to place two pictures side by side in the blog, although I would prefer a little space between them.