Martin Lewis issued warning to those using air fryers for quick Christmas dinners

Sure, there’s the presents, there’s the spending time with your family and the big TV specials but let’s be honest there’s one part of Christmas Day that most of us are most excited about: the food, obviously.

The roasties, the meat, the trimmings, the pigs in blankets, all of it. And it’s a lot of work too, there’s no denying that.

So, with them being plenty of Brits go-to gadget in the kitchen, you might be considering whacking on the air fryer to save some time with your feast.

However, Martin Lewis issued a warning to anyone planning on using theirs for a quicker Christmas dinner. Yep, the UK favourite himself.

The finance guru gave a festive warning (ITV)

During a previous appearance on This Morning, the 52-year-old said: “If that’s being done for energy reasons, I would be somewhat sceptical whether that is a good idea.

“If it’s being done for taste, I don’t want to get involved. I mean, the benefit of an oven is when you’re cooking a lot for a lot of people, and you can fill all the racks and have it on consistently.

“Air fryers are good for small things that cook quickly.

“If you’re gonna have to use your air fryer 15 different times for different items generally on energy usage, you’d be better off to use an oven. So it’s an interesting thought.”

And if you are wanting an alternative, Lewis suggested: "A microwave I believe, from memory, gives you consistent heat whereas an oven is warming up to full temperature and then topping it up so it isn’t running at full power the whole time.

You might want to re-think (Getty Stock Image)

“But if you’re doing a jacket potato for 10 minutes it’s going to be far cheaper [in the microwave] than doing a single jacket potato in an oven and keeping it on for an hour and a half.

“However if you were doing a full roast dinner and you were cooking many of them, that is where it’s probably cheaper than putting five or six jacket potatoes in a microwave because each additional object you put in a microwave, you need to keep it on longer because a microwave just heats the individual object.

“General equation is, find the wattage of an item, then work out how many kilowatts or what fraction of a kilowatt it’s using, then multiply that by 34p per hour of use.”

He explained: “If you had a 1000W microwave and you put it on for 10 minutes, one KWH for a sixth of an hour, a sixth of 34p is about 6p, shall we say?

“So it’s 6p turning the microwave on for that amount of time. So yes, it’s a very useful equation.”