I love how it browns veggies and vegan protein sources like chickpeas, tempeh, and tofu with minimal oil. PCMag is obsessed with culture and tech, offering smart, spirited coverage of the products and innovations that shape our connected lives and the digital trends that keep us talking. The windows, along with a light in the cooking chamber, mean you can easily watch your food as it browns.

You can’t combine the two drawers, but you can sync them to prepare multiple dishes at once, with a total capacity of 7. The key to crisp fries was to peel and soak the potatoes in cold water for half an hour to remove starch, before drying thoroughly. The Ninja Foodi 6-in-1 is quick, but when we considered value, capacity, and usage, the Instant was the best. Generally, you’ll find her watching the latest Netflix series, digging around in the garden or attempting to make a cake that is edible. Most air-fryers are multifunctional but not all extend their practicality to usable baking functions.The Reuse Network lists the nearest charities and community projects that will welcome your old gadgets.

Preheat Function: Unique to Cosori Air Fryers, the Preheat function takes just 2–5 minutes and visibly improves food texture. The outside of the appliance stayed cool during cooking and, overall, it was easy to use thanks to clear instructions and recipes. The other functions that the Ninja DG551 can do is grill, roast, bake, dehydrate, and broil food - all which we found did better than the Ninja Foodie 6-in-1 10-qt.If you want to know more about popular brand Ninja, our friends at olive magazine have written guides to best Ninja air-fryer and the latest Ninja deals.

The lid is hinged, rather than removable, which our tester found slightly awkward to use, and may make under-cupboard storage tricky. If you want to adapt a recipe for air-frying, BBC Good Food’s food copy editor Samuel Goldsmith recommends reducing the cooking time by 20%. The COSORI CAF-LI401S, the Tower T17039, and the Xiaomi Mi Smart Air Fryer are cheaper good quality air fryers.

I enjoyed using these recipes to familiarise myself with the air fryer, testing the Mongolian chicken wings and roasted cauliflower recipes, as well as the potato wedges recipe. This is useful, especially for making evenly cooked french fries, but if you don't shake immediately the same sound will go off a minute later, which could be a little annoying. However, for the quality of components and cooking results it’s great value for money offering roast, bake, grill and dehydrate functions in addition to air-frying. Just be aware that the small size also means losing two headline features of the bigger Vortex models, OdorErase and ClearCook.

Finally, while the air frying function doesn’t make full use of its generous capacity, its spacious interior does grant more real estate to spread out your food while cooking.Not just an air fryer, this multi-cooker also grills, sears, roasts, bakes and slow cooks, making it a smart choice if you’re after a space-saving do-it-all appliance. The COSORI has a "shake" setting on certain presets, which sounds a loud beep five times to remind you to shake your food in the tray. Chips are next – they look for quickly cooked, well-browned and crunchy skins that house fluffy interiors. However, if you need to use an air fryer multiple times to make enough food to feed your household, you’re probably better off cooking everything in one go in the oven.