Editorial Guidelines

last_updated: 2026-05-03

This page documents how AirFryerWise decides what to publish, how recipes are tested, where data comes from, and what we will and will not do. If anything on the site does not meet the standard below, write to us. We update what is wrong.

Last updated: 2026-05-03. Maintained by: Cole Bendrick, editor.

1. Mission

Air fryer recipes that work across brands. Each one is checked against the published cook-time references for at least two machine families before publishing, because basket size changes the timing more than the recipe does. The method is the headline. Sources are cited. Mistakes are annotated. Versions are stamped. Internal temperatures are verified.

AirFryerWise is not a lifestyle blog, not a wellness brand, and not a publication that ships recipes from a manufacturer’s cookbook without testing. It is a working test kitchen with notes on three different machines.

2. Who writes here

One byline: Cole Bendrick. Five years inside Texas food media before this site existed. All recipe development, testing, photography, and writing is his unless a guest contributor is named at the top of the post (which has not happened yet, but the policy is in place).

If a recipe came from a reader, a cookbook, or a brand reference, the source is named at the top of the post. Adapted recipes credit the original author, the publication, and the year. We do not republish a third party’s recipe text. We test, rewrite in our voice, document the changes, and credit.

3. Topic selection

How a recipe gets into the queue:

Reader demand. If three or more readers ask for the same dish through the contact form, it moves to the top of the list.
Search demand. Keyword research for the niche (air fryer recipes, USA market). High-volume topics with low competitor quality get priority.
Seasonal fit. Game-day wings in fall, frozen-food shortcuts during back-to-school, lighter vegetable mains in summer.
Pillar coverage. Each of the six categories (chicken, vegetables, frozen foods, breakfast, snacks, desserts) is filled out methodically. Holes in coverage become drafts.

What we say no to:

“Top 10 air fryer products” roundups assembled from PR pitches.
Recipes that exist only to capture a trend with zero personal interest.
Cuisine from cultures we do not understand well enough to represent without distortion. We refer readers to creators inside that culture instead.

4. How a recipe earns a page

Nothing publishes until the method has been checked end to end. The three passes:

Test 1: baseline. Cook the recipe as drafted on the Cosori Pro II (our default 6-quart bench). Time everything with a stopwatch. Photograph the failure points. Note what felt off.
Test 2: revise. Apply the lessons from test 1 (often: too much oil, basket too crowded, wrong shake interval). Cook again with changes documented.
Test 3: lock and cross-validate. Cook the revised recipe on at least one second machine (Ninja Foodi or Philips XXL) to flag brand-specific behavior. If this run produces the result we want, the recipe is locked. If not, we go back to test 2 with brand notes attached.

Variations on the same base (different wing sauce, different frozen-food brand) are not separate tests. They are extensions. Real different conditions (different brand of air fryer, different basket size, different food brand) count.

For air fryer reviews specifically, we use the unit for at least 20 cooking sessions across multiple food types (chicken, frozen, vegetables) before forming an opinion. For accessory reviews, we use the accessory through at least three different recipes.

5. Source citation

Every claim that goes beyond “I cooked this” cites a source.

Cooking-time reference values for the calculator come from the consensus of three named industry sources (Cosori Cookbook, Ninja Test Kitchen, Philips Recipe Lab). The full method is on the cook time methodology page.
Internal-temperature targets come from USDA / FoodSafety.gov. We do not invent doneness numbers. 165°F for chicken, 145°F for whole cuts of beef and pork (with 3-min rest), 160°F for ground meat, 145°F for fish.
Nutrition figures come from USDA FoodData Central. We do not invent macros.
Food-safety claims (cooling times, storage windows, basket cleaning) come from USDA, FDA, or peer-reviewed food-science sources. Cited inline.
Historical or cultural claims about a dish’s origin require at least two independent sources. We will not pass off a marketing legend as history.

Where a claim is our own opinion or experience (“I find this brand crisps better than that one”), it is flagged as such. Personal opinion is not dressed up as authority.

6. Images

The images on this site are produced in house to show what a dish looks like. They are not pulled from a stock library, and they are digitally created and edited rather than a single studio photograph of one hand-plated batch. Read them as a guide to the result you are aiming for, not as a literal photo of the exact basket that produced the recipe.

7. AI and writing

This is the question every recipe site is asked, so here is the explicit position.

What AI does on AirFryerWise:

Spell-check and grammar suggestions.
Drafting outlines that the editor then rewrites in his own voice.
Brainstorming alternative section orders or headings.
Checking for accidental repetition across articles.

What AI does not do on AirFryerWise:

Decide what to cook.
Invent timing data, brand offsets, or internal temperatures.
Write the experience of standing over a hot air fryer basket.
Generate images of finished food that we then publish as if we cooked it.
Write the “what I learned on test 2” notes.

The editorial voice is one human’s voice. Where a passage was AI-drafted and then heavily rewritten, the rewritten version is what ships. AI is a spell-checker, not a co-author.

8. Versioning and corrections

Every recipe carries a version number, starting at v1.0.

v1.0: the recipe at original publish.
v1.1, v1.2, …: small corrections (typo, swapped step order, clarified measurement). The change is logged at the bottom of the recipe with the date.
v2.0, v3.0, …: a meaningful change (different temperature, different cooking time, different recommended basket size). The previous version is preserved in the version log.

When a reader catches an error, we fix it within 48 hours of confirming the error, bump the version, log the change, and credit the reader unless they ask not to be named.

If a recipe is so flawed that it should not have shipped, we say so in the version log and consider unpublishing. We do not silently delete posts to hide bad work.

9. Comments and reader contributions

Comments are moderated. We aim to publish them within 24 hours on weekdays.

Substantive corrections are addressed in the comment thread and, if right, applied to the recipe with a version bump.
Brand-specific reports (“on my Ninja, this took 4 more minutes”) are logged. When patterns emerge, the recipe gets brand-specific notes.
Substitution questions get answered if the substitution is something we have actually tested. If not, we say “I have not tested that, my best guess is…” and label the guess.
Comments are removed if they are spam, hostile, off-topic, or attempts to insert affiliate links. The standards are spelled out in the terms of use.

10. Sponsored content and affiliate links

Standing rules:

We only link to air fryers and tools we have personally used.
Commission does not influence whether something gets a positive review.
Sponsored posts are labeled at the top of the article.
Brands cannot pay to be added to a “best of” roundup.

The full position is on the affiliate disclosure page.

11. Conflicts of interest

If the editor has a personal or financial relationship with a brand, ingredient, or tool that appears in a post, that relationship is disclosed in the post itself, not buried in a sitewide page.

The current relationships:

Amazon Associates affiliate (US).
Newsletter platform: a paid Mailchimp (Intuit Inc.) account.
Comment spam filter: Akismet (Automattic Inc.).
Web hosting: a paid commercial host.

None of the above currently has editorial influence over what gets published. We do not currently hold a paid affiliation, sponsorship, or revenue-share with any air fryer brand.

12. What we get wrong

Probably more than we have caught yet. Some failure modes we know about and try to mitigate:

Bench-air-fryer bias. Cosori Pro II is our default 6-quart bench. Even with cross-validation on Ninja Foodi and Philips XXL, the recipe was developed on Cosori first. Edge cases on other machines may slip through.
Wattage variability. Two units of the same model can vary by 100W or more. Where we know a model has wide unit-to-unit variability, we flag it.
Single-altitude bias. The test kitchen is in Austin (low altitude). Recipes for high-altitude cooks may need slight time adjustments.
Single palate bias. “Salt to taste” reflects one person’s salt tolerance. We give a starting amount, not a final amount.
Single-cuisine bias. The editor cooks confidently across American, Tex-Mex, and broadly Mediterranean traditions. Coverage of pan-Asian, South Asian, North African, and Latin American cuisines exists but is shallower, and we will not pretend otherwise. When we publish in those areas, we lean on named source recipes, credit the original authors, and try to avoid flattening regional distinctions into a generic “Asian-inspired” label. If you cook in a tradition we cover badly, please write in: corrections in this category get fixed quickly.

13. How to challenge a piece of content

Send a message through the contact page with the URL, the specific claim or step you think is wrong, and (if you can) the source you would point to instead. Substantive corrections are reviewed within 48 hours on weekdays. Persistent, well-sourced corrections shape the recipe.

14. Updates to these guidelines

We update this page when we change how we work. The “last updated” date at the top reflects the latest revision. Substantive changes are noted in the change log below.

Change log format. Entries are listed in reverse-chronological order (most recent first), each with an ISO date, a short summary of what changed, and the author of the change.

Change log

2026-05-03 · Cole Bendrick · First public version of these editorial guidelines.