One of my colleagues is an air cooker evangelist. He worships at the alter of cooking things like one would in an oven, only slightly quicker, and in the middle of your work surface. And while I don’t necessarily share his passion, I will concede it was very useful when, last December, I was paired with him for our Secret Santa exchange.
I figured it would be pretty easy to find a new air fryer cookbook for the £10 limit we’d been set. On average, six new air fryer cookbooks are launched in the UK every ten minutes, and most of these are available next to the magazines at Asda. But I don’t live near an Asda, so I went online instead.
The internet, it turns out, exists solely to sell air fryer cookbooks. That’s all that’s left these days. Air fryer cookbooks and weird Facebook posts of crustacean Jesus. Both are usually generated by AI.
Jonathan Stirling’s Amazon bio describes him as ‘a passionate chef, food enthusiast and author dedicated to making cooking both enjoyable and accessible to everyone’. His extensive bio mentions the various kitchens he honed his skills in, but not by name. It touches upon the diverse cuisines he has experimented with, but won’t specify any in particular. Stirling has only one book to his name, the snappily titled Air Fryer Cookbook: 2000 Day Super Delicious, Quick and Easy Air Fryer Recipes for Beginners.
Amazon is overloaded with books like this: AI-generated recipe collections credited to AI-generated authors. Last month the journalist Matthew Kupfer did a deep dive on Twitter into The Complete Crockpot Cookbook for Beginners: 2000 Days Easy and Delicious Recipes, a similar title by Luisa Florence (which happens to be an anagram of ‘Cruel AI Felons’, but that’s beside the point). Like Stirling’s book, The Complete Crockpot offers recipes for 2000 days. I’m still unsure if this means the book has 2000 different recipes, or perhaps 6000, allowing one for each meal of the day. As Kupfer pointed out, it’s a rather arbitrary number of days anyway, coming in at just under five and a half years.1
By and large, I’m not against the implementation of AI. I’d just rather we were applying it to something useful. We are frequently told that AI can make life easier for us, and that it will replace our menial tasks and allow us to enjoy our lives more. Why, then, am I still stuck doing menial tasks while AI gets to spend its afternoons creating recipes for air fryer battered Oreos?
AI is a tool that has an almost unlimited capacity to help us do the world’s most difficult jobs. The problem is that, currently, it is being championed by the two groups of people least equipped to understand what a difficult job is. There are the Del Boy-esque grifters who are looking for easy money - Billy Coull of Glasgow’s farcical Wonka event has an Amazon author page of his own, featuring seventeen titles, most of which appear to directly rip off The Da Vinci Code. And there are the other sort of grifters: billionaires.
In an ideal world, AI is used to relieve people of their tiresome manual work and free them up for creative endeavours, or meaningful pursuits. But currently the technology is being led by people for whom manual labour isn’t a major concern - they’ve already got people to do that for them. Instead, they’re using AI to do the one thing truly and completely out of their reach: think creatively.
And so we have online booksellers swamped with badly written books because the people writing the prompts don’t understand what a good book looks like. Our films feature shitty AI illustrations because the producers don’t understand the value of an artist.
Pink Floyd came under fire last week, despite not having existed for the best part of three decades, when a competition to find a fan-animated video awarded one prize to the most generic piece of AI crap I think I’ve yet seen. The problem wasn’t so much that the video took away prizes from other artists - the three main awards went to gorgeous animations that had clearly been labours of love for their creators. Instead, the problem was that people were trying to win competitions with artificial work, and that those with the power to decide - in this case the marketing team behind a defunct rock band - were encouraging the behaviour. For them, the competition was never about developing talent, it was about sourcing the creativity they lacked. The decision to champion a video of morphing AI guitars revealed their desolate imaginations to the world.
Marvel’s recent TV show, Secret Invasion, was also widely criticised, this time for its opening credits - a lazy morphing AI mess that captured, to be entirely fair, two of the show’s major elements: shapeshifters, and being really fucking tedious.
But this is the insidious truth about AI: we’re doing it all wrong. If we really are meant to be using it to make things easier, why are we dedicating it solely to the one area in life that needs it least? AI shouldn’t be doing creative work for us - it should be doing everything else so that we have the time and energy to do the creative shit ourselves. Because honestly, if I keep having to do all this damn work, when am I ever going to be able to set aside 2000 days to spend with my air fryer?
I’m sitting comfortably at nine ideas for chicken, so it’s fair to assume I’m a little way off releasing my debut recipe collection, ‘Chicken Leg Recipes: Super Delicious and Simple Food Ideas 2000 Days Easy and Flavourful Cookbook’.
This time round I wanted to explore ideas for chicken drumsticks, which are another affordable cut from the leg, and have the satisfying quality of allowing you to eat like a caveman. Or, more realistically, an ancient South East Asian, given that’s where we first domesticated the birds some ten thousand years ago.
I’ve opted for a recipe that draws on flavours from a little further up the coast - Korea’s gochujang does much of the heavy lifting in this dish, which is afforded some balance from the sweet honey.
Though this recipe will take you about an hour to get on the table, it’s a great option for midweek meals. Most of the time is dedicated wholly to the drumsticks sitting happily in the oven, cooking and crisping up in anticipation of the sticky, spicy sauce.
Honey Gochujang Chicken
Serves 2-42
8 chicken drumsticks
1/2 tbsp salt
1/2 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp ground ginger
3 tbsp gochujang3
3 tbsp honey
1 tbsp toasted sesame oil
1 tbsp rice vinegar
150g blue cheese, to garnish4
3 spring onions, greens thinly sliced, to garnish
Let’s get cooking:
Preheat the oven to 220°c. Line a large baking sheet with aluminium foil or baking paper.
Pat the drumsticks dry with kitchen paper and place in a large bowl. Combine the salt, baking powder and ground ginger in a small bowl, and toss over the drumsticks, coating them as thoroughly as possible.
Transfer the coated drumsticks onto the baking sheet, making sure to keep them separate. Place the sheet in the centre of the oven, and bake for 25 minutes.
Remove the pan from the oven and carefully turn the drumsticks over. Return them and bake for a final 25 minutes.
Meanwhile, combine the gochujang, honey, sesame oil and vinegar in a small saucepan, and bring to a boil over a medium heat. Cook for 3 minutes and, when slightly syrupy, remove from the heat. If the sauce thickens too much you can add a little water to loosen it back up.
Transfer the cooked drumsticks into a large serving bowl and pour the sauce over them. Toss the drumsticks to coat them completely, and crumble the blue cheese over the top. Sprinkle the spring onions as a final flourish.
Eat.
You won’t need a knife and fork for these. We’re in a ‘scuse fingers situation here. Your accompaniments should match. Though I’d usually pick classic fries over their sweet potato equivalent, the latter works really well with the spicy chicken.
Toasted sesame seeds are a welcome garnish, too. They’ll be stuck in your teeth for the rest of the evening, but they’ll class up the dish no end.
It’s a real long shot that any of you will find yourselves in the sleepy market town of Fakenham any time soon. Unless you are a devotee of Linda McCartney sausages or Kinnerton’s sub-par chocolate, there’s not a lot of reason to visit. That said, should you find yourself plonked in one of Norfolk’s drabbest towns, you’d be smart to head to the Red Lion Lounge, which has been a bright spot during our time round these parts. The gastro pub’s kitchen is run by a whopping great green flag of a man, who puts real effort into his gluten free menu not because he himself suffers an intolerance - but because his best friend does. It’s all very sweet. The portions are huge, and the menu flitters between refined flavour combinations (Blackberry BBQ ribs with a fennel and apple slaw) and American-style over-indulgence. The Spicy Devil Burger comes with two massive chilli peppers sticking out of the top like demonic horns. The Fish Supper Burger features a gigantic chunk of battered cod, mushy peas, curry sauce and thick cut chips all within the bun itself. The latter is enough to kill a small adult, but also the most delicious burger I’ve eaten in years.
Two very different albums are currently tied for album of the year, and though it’s still relatively early in 2024, it’s great to have such strong records already in competition. Sierra Ferrell’s Trail of Flowers came out last month and is, at its heart, a country album. But there’s a lot more hidden under the surface, and I’m wholly drawn in by jazzy inflections and Ferrell’s gorgeous writing. At the other end of the scale is Conan Gray’s third album, Found Heaven. Gray is one of the best proper pop stars to have emerged this decade - his debut album was released three days before the UK went into lockdown in 2020, and was a reliable mood lifter for the months that followed. Found Heaven appears to coincide with the American’s discovery of Depeche Mode, which makes for one of the best pop records in years.
Also, obviously, Beyoncé exists and Cowboy Carter is absolutely remarkable. I’m still not sold on the new lyrics for ‘Jolene’, but ‘AMERIICAN REQUIEM’, ‘YA YA’ and ‘BLACKBIIRD’ are all exceptional. That said, my biggest ‘old man yells at a cloud’ belief is that people need to stop writing their song titles in all caps or all lower case.
I had a big, belated catch up on this year’s Oscar contenders earlier this month. My takeaway: American Fiction is great, but over-stuffed (which is very much a trait of Percival Everett stories), Anatomy of a Fall is excellent and Messi the dog is even better, and Killers of the Flower Moon would have been far better had the story been told from the perspective of Lily Gladstone’s character. I’m still to watch Oppenheimer, but I gasped aloud to myself this week when Sky’s NOW TV app sent a notification to my phone saying ‘Cillian Murphy is the BOMB in Oppenheimer, now available to watch’. This is why we can’t have nice things.
A review on Amazon reveals that the air fryer book actually features less than eighty recipes in total, and that many of these barely constitute what we might consider a recipe: ‘Peach Cobbler “recipe” says to take some peaches, flour, butter sugar, mix and cook. No weights, no measures, no cooking time.’ Another reveals that the BBQ Pulled Pork recipe calls for 500g pulled pork and BBQ sauce and features just one direction: ‘Place in air fryer and heat’.
This one is on you. Should two chicken drumsticks suffice for a normal adult? Yes. Absolutely. Can I absolute demolish four of these in a single sitting? Also yes. And frankly, I reckon I could put a decent dent into the other half too.
My usual advice around gochujang stands here: if you’re coeliac or gluten intolerant, you’ll want to source a gluten free version. My favourite is this one from Sous Chef. It’s the best value on the market, but is also significantly spicier than most other gochujang brands. I use 1-2 tablespoons for this recipe.
I tend to keep it local to the East Midlands, with Stilton. My favourite is the variety made in the Cropwell Bishop creamery. It’s easy to find in most supermarkets. The same cheesemakers are also behind a much softer blue, Beauvale, which works wonderfully here too, and currently sits amongst my top three cheeses, just behind the most mature cheddar known to man, and Suffolk’s Baron Bigod.