Though it does have to be quite small to fit inside, we used the ingenious rotisserie setting for restaurant-quality chicken that was on the table in under an hour. Frozen sausage rolls and, surprisingly, parsnips were also both winners, but the stand-out dish from this machine was a whole roast chicken. This meant the freshly-made chips from this air fryer were cooked in no time and among the best we tasted – perfectly crispy outside but gorgeously fluffy inside. Inside, there’s also a fantastic rotating basket that automatically turns food during cooking to ensure it’s cooked evenly. The controls were among the easiest to operate thanks to easy picture guides for every pre-set, a clear display and one-button dial operation.
Buy now £ 99.99, Īnother mighty multi-tasking machine that does almost everything but decide what you want for dinner, this Innoteck mini oven is a worktop whopper you won’t fail to be impressed by. This was also one of the few air fryers we tested without a digital display but we found the chunky dials very intuitive to operate so you’ll be rustling up golden chips for the whole family in no time. There’s plenty of space for a whole chicken and we loved the huge glass door that made it easy to keep an eye on dishes inside. It preheats in a matter of moments (a godsend on a rushed weeknight) and fits in six slices of toast or a 12in pizza, which was cooked to perfection. Once you are plugged in, there’s very little this clever appliance can’t do, including grill, bake, toast and keep warm.
It looks more like a microwave than an air fryer so you’ll need plenty of free worktop space – we also would’ve liked a longer cable so we had more choice about where it could go.
If you’re always cooking for a full house, go straight to this machine. It’s perfect for rustling up a midweek roast that tastes like you spent hours slaving over a hot oven. We were especially impressed by the rotisserie function, which can be used to make juicy kebabs better than any takeaway or cook a small chicken in less than an hour. In fact, we soon found we were automatically heading straight to this do-everything machine instead of turning on our oven, as it’s much quicker to heat up and cook. It’s even big enough to squeeze in a pizza that came out particularly well, with a crispy base and golden cheese on top. We also loved the large clear glass door which made it easy to peek at everything while cooking to make sure it turned out perfectly. It’s big enough to hold three separate trays of food so it’s a doddle to cook potatoes or vegetables at the same time as a piece of meat or fish. With a whopping 11 litre capacity, this chunky appliance actually has ten cooking functions including grill, roast, toast, bake, grill and dehydrate. You’ll get way more than a new way of cooking chips with this machine – which is more like a tabletop oven than an air fryer. But if you have the (considerable) space on your worktop, you’ll use this sturdy, good-looking machine over and over again. Having two smaller compartments instead of one large one means you won’t be able to cook bigger items like a whole roast chicken though. Roast, bake, dehydrate and reheat settings mean it can replace your oven for cooking almost anything including leftover pizza, vegetable crisps and roasted meat – we made deliciously moist salmon fillet and roast potatoes in ours. It’s particularly good at cooking food like chicken nuggets from frozen, reaching temperatures of 24C for meals in minutes. The auto-adjust fan automatically changes speed based on the cooking function selected while the sync feature guarantees each drawer is ready to serve at the same time. It’s super simple to use too, with a digital control panel, countdown timer and variable temperature controls you can tweak to make every meal perfect. We found this invaluable for rustling up entire meals including fried chicken and chips in one go, but also when catering for different tastes within one household – when one child fancies spicy sweet potato fries but the other will only eat plain bog-standard chips for instance. The standout feature is simple, but a kitchen game changer: the air fryer comes with two independent cooking zones so you can cook two foods, two ways, at the same time. This may not be the smallest machine we tested but it was certainly one of the cleverest.