Basketball styles: Probably the original style of air fryers, basket-style refers to the basket that pulls in and out of the unit like a drawer. They’ve been improved over the years to have a larger capacity and great usefulness outside of cooking only one serving. They’re also more compact and portable than other styles of air fryers.

Dual-basket style: Take a basket-style air fryer and add a second basket, and you’ll have your dual-basket air fryer. They double the utility of any model, and you can simultaneously cook food at different temperatures and for different lengths of time without disturbing the other. They are larger in size but that extra usefulness can make or break which model you purchase.

Air fryer toaster ovens: These are essentially shrunken-down ovens for use on your kitchen counter. They are infinitely transportable and can do everything from bake, roast, dehydrate and broil.

A Note on the “Healthiness” of Air Fryers

Just because a brownie is cooked in an air fryer, it doesn’t make it healthier. Same goes for those frozen French fries. The real benefit of air frying is the ability to control the total fat that is absorbed by any food compared to pan frying or deep frying. If those items were previously fried and then heated up again, their fat content hasn’t changed. Fat is necessary for a healthy diet. Air fryers are way less intimidating than a vat of bubbling hot oil but what you put into them

It seems like there’s always a little more eggnog in the carton than we know what to do with, so we set out to create the perfect recipe to use it up. Enter: eggnog French toast! It turns out that eggnog makes the ideal French toast custard base in place of traditional milk, half-and-half, or cream. Enriched with eggs and spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, and rum extract, this eggnog French toast recipe has all the flavors you love in an eggnog cocktail, but in a family-friendly breakfast format.

The trick to custardy (but not soggy) French toast is to use dried-out bread; compared to fresh bread, it absorbs more of the custard and keeps its shape rather than falling apart as it soaks. We give our bread a 10-minute toast in a 275º oven to get the job done. (Dried bread makes for a better texture than stale, which retains a lot of moisture. If you do happen to have a stale loaf, still go ahead and dry the slices in the oven.) Just make sure you give the bread at least 30 minutes to soak before cooking—while it may increase your prep time, it really does make a difference in achieving that custardy center.

To create a textural contrast, we sprinkle the bread with a little sugar before cooking. The result is a crispy, glazey, caramelized crust that complements the toast’s rich, eggy interior. It’s just sweet enough to stand on its own, but we love it drizzled