Nigella Lawson, the 63-year-old television chef, has surprised fans by confessing she knows 'nothing' about air fryers and only recently used one for the first time. The revelation came during her one-off BBC special, 'Nigella's Amsterdam Christmas', scheduled to air on December 21 at 8pm.
According to The Sun, Lawson has long preferred a traditional oven over the modern appliance, which circulates hot air around food with minimal oil. In the show, she demonstrates how to make crispy chicken thighs in an air fryer for her Indonesian biryani recipe. 'I have a little something extra for my biryani. When I cooked the chicken thighs they were skinless and that is because I removed the skin and whopped them at max in the air fryer to make chicken crackling to sprinkle over the top,' she said.
Lawson also made another surprising confession: she refuses to do ironing and does not own an ironing board, opting instead for a steamer. Speaking to Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2 on December 15, she said, 'I steam, I don't iron. And as you can see, I'm not a particularly uncrumpled person in my natural state.' She added, 'Also, I seem to have bits of cake batter on my sleeve.'
The chef admitted that wrapping Christmas presents is 'the job I hate the most', despite once selling wrapping paper featuring artwork from her cookery book 'How To Be A Domestic Goddess'. 'It's just that I'm so incompetent that everything goes wrong. I always have bits of hair stuck under the Sellotape, it's a nightmare,' she said.
Earlier this year, Lawson revealed she has 'fallen out of the habit' of hosting large dinner parties. She told The Times, 'I'll have a person or a couple of people over quite often and I keep planning to have people round in a proper grown-up way but I haven't yet. I must!'
