1. Kitchen
  2. Small kitchen appliances

The Best Air Fryer

By Mace Dent Johnson, Caira Blackwell and Michael Sullivan
Updated
Our three picks for best airfryer, displayed next to each other and some plates with french fries and chicken nuggets.
Photo: Marki Williams

Nothing revives leftover french fries or crisps up a handful of dino nuggets quite like an air fryer. If you’re looking for a compact kitchen appliance to bridge the gap between a microwave and a conventional oven, a pod-shaped air fryer might do the trick.

Using convection baking—basically a powerful fan that circulates hot air around your food—an air fryer crisps food like an oven does, but it heats up and cooks much faster.

We’ve tested dozens of models since 2017, and we recommend the Philips 3000 Series Airfryer L HD9200/91 or its touchscreen-operated twin, the HD9252/91. It crisps food quickly and evenly, and its interface is straightforward and minimal (though the manual dials can be difficult to turn). And it's the best price we’ve seen for this level of performance.

 

Everything we recommend

Our pick

With a simple interface and a great price, this no-frills air fryer heats fast and crisps quickly and evenly.

Buying Options

This variant performs identically to our top pick, but has a touch screen that we found less straightforward to use, and often costs a bit more.

Upgrade pick

This air fryer cooked the fastest and most evenly of any air fryer we tested, and the interface, with a smooth dial and manual buttons, is one of the easiest to use.

Buying Options

Also great

The Instant Vortex Mini is small, powerful, and one of the cheapest models we tested. While the wee basket can fit only one serving of food at a time, the machine circulates heat fairly well and manages to cook food without dehydrating it.

Buying Options

What to consider


  • What is air frying?

    Air fryers are mini convection ovens. They use fans to rapidly circulate hot air and crisp your food.

  • The pros

    Air fryers are compact and don’t need to preheat, which cuts down on cook time.

  • The cons

    The size of these machines limits the amount of food you can cook at once, and they don’t always cook evenly.

  • Other options

    If you want a more spacious, versatile appliance, consider a convection toaster oven or air fryer toaster oven.

Our pick

With a simple interface and a great price, this no-frills air fryer heats fast and crisps quickly and evenly.

Buying Options

This variant performs identically to our top pick, but has a touch screen that we found less straightforward to use, and often costs a bit more.

The 3-quart (by our measurement) Philips 3000 Series Airfryer L HD9200/91 gets food crispy quickly, cooking faster and more evenly than any other machine we’ve tested in this price range. It’s also easy to use and clean.

This air fryer crisped chicken nuggets, fries, and wings nearly as well as our upgrade pick, the Philips Premium Airfryer HD9741. It has a minimal display, with just a temperature dial and a timer. The air fryer basket is relatively easy to clean, with a nonstick coating and a less frustrating grate design than those of other air fryers we tested.

The Philips 3000 Series Airfryer L HD9252/91 is the same air fryer as the HD9200/91, but this one has a touch screen instead of dials. Neither display is perfect. The touchscreen is cluttered with unhelpful preset programs and can be hard to activate with greasy fingers. The dials, though refreshingly simple, are too close together. And the timer dial is hard to turn counterclockwise, which you have to do if you want to turn the air fryer off before time is up (better to just unplug the machine). But neither display is a dealbreaker.

These machines are slim, look inoffensive, and have small footprints for air fryers of this capacity. The Philips Airfryer L with dials typically costs around $120, and the Philips Airfryer L with a touchscreen around $150, where other similarly performing air fryers cost roughly double that, or as much as one of our (more durable and versatile) convection toaster oven picks.

A note on size: We’ve found the listed capacities of Philips air fryers to be inconsistent and inaccurate. The Premium Airfryer HD9741, our upgrade pick, is incorrectly listed as one quart larger than the Airfryer L. We measured the volume of our two Philips picks, and they both have approximately a 3-quart volume (the Premium measures 3.1 quarts, and the Airfryer L 2.9 quarts).

Upgrade pick

This air fryer cooked the fastest and most evenly of any air fryer we tested, and the interface, with a smooth dial and manual buttons, is one of the easiest to use.

Buying Options

The 3-quart Philips Premium Airfryer HD9741 is one of the best pod-shaped air fryers out there. It cooked the crispiest french fries and the most evenly golden chicken nuggets. We also like that it has only four preprogrammed settings: frozen fries, chicken, fish, and meat, all of which you access through a single dial on the control panel. More settings on other machines felt like overkill, since we ended up just using the manual settings regardless.

But the basket of this machine is very heavy, and the price tag is steep—we think this machine is most worth it if it’s on sale, or if you truly need the speed and convenience of a deluxe pod. Otherwise, you could get more bang for your buck with a similarly priced convection toaster oven.

Also great

The Instant Vortex Mini is small, powerful, and one of the cheapest models we tested. While the wee basket can fit only one serving of food at a time, the machine circulates heat fairly well and manages to cook food without dehydrating it.

Buying Options

With a 2-quart capacity, the Instant Vortex Mini 4-in-1 is the smallest air fryer we tested, but it held its own against much larger machines. Though the Instant Mini’s square basket is a quart smaller than that of the Philips Airfryer L or the Philips Premium HD9741, it comfortably fits one or two servings of food thanks to its wide, shallow shape.

This air fryer cooked as fast and almost as evenly as our other picks. Its streamlined interface has only four preprogrammed settings—air fry, roast, bake, and reheat—all operated by a single dial, which makes the Vortex Mini easy to use right out of the box. Plus, the air fryer is lightweight, with a diminutive footprint and the lightest basket of any air fryer we tested.

Since 2017, we’ve spent around 300 hours testing air fryers, cooking up fresh chicken wings, frozen french fries, pizza, brownies, and more in dozens of air fryers and convection toaster ovens. We’ve tested pod-shaped air fryers against air fryer toaster ovens, as well as researched and tested full-size convection ovens and deep fryers.

A convection toaster oven next to an air fryer with a basket handle.
Here are two types of appliances you can use to “air fry”: a toaster oven with convection (left) and a pod-shaped air fryer (right). Photo: Marki Williams

Air frying is simply a marketing term for strong convection baking—the kind of cooking that involves circulating hot air around food. So you can get air-fried results from other convection appliances, like convection ovens and toaster ovens.

But unlike these larger, pricier appliances, many pod-shaped air fryers are compact, fast, easy to use, and even a little fun. They are great for snacks, small households, meals for one, or people who want to avoid using an oven for any reason.

If you want to get food ready fast and are especially interested in getting things crispy, pod-shaped air fryers can be a boon, cooking quickly and typically not requiring preheating.

A close-up of the heating coil and fan on the inside of an air fryer that has been opened.
Pod-shaped air fryers have a single fan and heating element positioned on top of the oven cavity. Photo: Sarah Kobos

But pod-shaped air fryers do have some pitfalls. Their capacity is limited compared with the amount of food you could put on a half-sheet tray in an oven or a quarter-sheet tray in a toaster oven.

Air fryers trade temperature accuracy for speed. We tested air fryers that consistently overshot the target temperature by as much as 30 degrees, and some that ran cool, never getting within 50 degrees of the target temperature.

The preprogrammed settings on air fryers—for things as vague as “vegetables” or as specific as “bacon”—are little more than useless recommendations, since they don’t consider the weight of food in the basket. And they’re often inaccurate, as air fryers usually fail to reach or maintain target temperatures.

Finally, air fryer baskets can be difficult to clean. Some claim to be dishwasher safe, but most have a nonstick coating that can be damaged by the dishwasher and will eventually wear off no matter how well you treat it.

When to consider a toaster oven

If you’re not set on a pod-shaped air fryer, if you have some extra space in your kitchen and cash in your budget, and if you want a larger-capacity, more versatile appliance that air fries, you might consider an air fryer toaster oven.

Convection ovens and air fryer toaster ovens typically cook more evenly than pod-shaped air fryers and give you space to cook more food. Larger-capacity pod-shaped air fryers—anything beyond about 5 quarts—tend to take longer to cook and do so less evenly. If you want to air fry for the whole family at once, a convection oven or air fryer toaster oven is your best bet.

These ovens also give you more delicate control over the way you cook—many give you the ability to turn the powerful convection fan off so your baked goods don’t become dried out. Some also let you input your food’s weight or quantity when using preprogrammed settings, for a more precise bake.

But air fryer toaster ovens may require preheating, can take longer to cook, often cost more, and usually take up more space than a pod-shaped air fryer.

If your main priority is simply to get a small, inexpensive appliance to crisp food better than a microwave, you might be happy with a small toaster oven without convection. These are cheaper and more compact than convection toaster ovens, and some are cheaper than air fryers. They can crisp better than a microwave but not as well as an air fryer.

When looking for a good air fryer, we consider the following:

Temperature control: We made sure each air fryer was actually able to reach its max temperature and maintain a relatively consistent temperature while cooking. We eliminated machines that ran too cold or fluctuated too wildly, producing unevenly cooked, mushy food.

Even cooking: We looked for even browning and crisping and dismissed models that left food scorched or soggy, as well as models with fans so powerful that they dried out the meal.

Compact design: Though we’ve tested machines of various sizes, we looked for streamlined machines whose countertop footprints were in proportion with the cooking volume inside the machine.

A square basket: Round baskets don’t hold as much food as square-shaped ones. To get the maximum use of space out of an air fryer, we think a square basket is key.

Easy to use: A good air fryer should be relatively intuitive to operate. We looked for air fryers with clearly labeled controls; simple, easy-to-read displays; and easy-to-remove baskets.

An easy-to-clean basket: Since the regular maintenance of air fryers is vital to their performance and overall lifespan, we generally avoided models with a lot of parts that would discourage people from properly cleaning them after every use.

A photo of a person in a striped apron and beige shirt pouring Ore-Ida french fries into a black Philips air fryer.
Photo: Michael Hession

Over the years, we’ve cooked a combination of commonly air-fried foods to test these machines: frozen and hand-cut french fries, frozen chicken tenders, frozen fish sticks, pork chops, chicken wings, brussels sprouts, leftover pizza, break-and-bake cookies, and boxed brownies.

We checked for even cooking, looking for machines that can cook a whole tray of ingredients consistently, with no overdone or underdone pieces. We wanted food to come out crisp on the outside but moist internally, without any burning or dehydrating.

We stuck an air probe thermometer inside each oven to see how well they maintained a set temperature. We also used all of the controls to see how easy they were to navigate and how accurate the cooking guidelines were for preparing common foods such as french fries and chicken nuggets. Additionally, we compared the cooking capacity of each model, and we took note of any egregiously noisy fans or annoying beeps. After testing, we washed all of the fryer components to see how easy they were to clean.

Our pick for best airfryer overall, the Philips 3000 Series Airfryer L HD9200/91.
Photo: Marki Williams

Our pick

With a simple interface and a great price, this no-frills air fryer heats fast and crisps quickly and evenly.

Buying Options

This variant performs identically to our top pick, but has a touch screen that we found less straightforward to use, and often costs a bit more.

We love the Philips 3000 Series Airfryer L HD9200/91’s simple interface and quick, effective crisping. Based on our own measurements, the Philips Airfryer L has a capacity just shy of 3 quarts. It performed nearly as well as our previous top pick (and current upgrade pick), the similarly sized Philips Premium Airfryer HD9741, and it costs about half as much. We think this machine strikes a balance between value and performance, giving you all the perks of a pod-shaped air fryer without nearing the price range of a more expensive, better-performing convection toaster oven.

If the HD9200/91 is sold out or you prefer a touchscreen, consider the Philips 3000 Series Airfryer L HD9252/91, which is the same air fryer but with a digital display. The touchscreen can be hard to activate with greasy fingers, but that is par for the course among air fryers we tested. The touchscreen also adds preset programs to the air fryer, but we don’t find those very useful. The touchscreen variant usually costs around $30 more. When it comes to cooking, both air fryers have the same quick, crisp performance.

It makes crispy food, fast. The Philips Airfryer L cooked up well-browned, crispy nuggets with no mushy spots or oily bottoms; whole baskets of crisp, golden fries; and juicy chicken wings, all without needing to add extra time. Only our upgrade pick, the Philips Premium, did better in our tests.

We love the version with dials for its refreshingly simple interface. Many air fryers offer superfluous presets hidden behind mystifying icons on an unresponsive touchscreen. The HD9200/91 has no touchscreen, only two dials—one for time and one for temperature––and no preprogrammed settings. We find it most effective to manually set the time and temperature on an air fryer, so we appreciate that this air fryer lets you get straight to the point. If you like using air fryer presets, you should choose a different air fryer, or opt for the (more expensive) touchscreen version of the Airfryer L.

The price is right. The Philips Airfryer L with dials usually costs around $120, which is about as much as we think an air fryer should cost, considering their limited utility and the prominence of plastic and nonstick pieces that may require replacement. The version with a touchscreen costs around $30 more, which is still decent for an air fryer of this size and quality.

The basket is easy to remove and insert. You don’t have to push a button to remove the drawer, and the air fryer stays in place on the table when you remove or insert the basket, so you can do so with one hand. Though the Airfryer L’s basket is about the same size as the one in the Philips Premium, it’s a full pound lighter.

The inner and outer baskets that can be dettached from the Philips 3000 Airfryer.
The Philips 3000 Series Airfryer L HD9200/91’s basket has two parts—the outer shell and the inner basket and handle—and it was among the easiest to clean. Photo: Marki Williams

The square basket is roomy. We were able to fit two to three servings of food in the basket, which is only about a half-inch smaller in length and width than that of the Philips Premium.

The basket is easier to clean than the Philips Premium’s. Where the Premium’s basket has wire mesh in a crosshatched diamond pattern, the Philips Airfryer L’s has a nonstick base with rectangular slots. These openings allow circulation but don’t trap oil and food the way the Premium’s basket does. It took only a minute or so for us to clean the Airfryer L’s basket, whereas the Premium’s required some soaking and careful scrubbing.

The machine is slim, with a relatively small footprint. Though its cooking capacity is about the same as the Philips Premium, the Philips Airfryer L’s footprint is about 1 square inch smaller. It’s visually more trim, too; the simple dials and nearly rectangular build set this air fryer apart from its globular, spaceship-like counterparts.

It comes with a two-year warranty. This is a generous warranty for an air fryer, but Philips customer service is not especially responsive.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The dials on the HD9200/91 can be difficult to use. We prefer the simple manual dials on this air fryer to the befuddling touchscreens of other air fryers (including the touchscreen variant of this model), but the dials are not very well designed. The temperature dial turns smoothly and without much force, but the timer dial requires more strength to turn.

A close-up of the two control dials on the front of the Philips 3000 Airfryer.
The Philips Airfryer L HD9200/91 has a simple interface, but the two control dials are a bit too close together to allow easy turning. Photo: Marki Williams

On the version with dials, there’s no easy “off” switch. To turn the air fryer on, you simply set the timer dial to your desired cook time. But if you made a mistake or decide you’re not ready to cook just yet, there are only two ways to turn the machine off. One way is to twist the timer backward to zero, but it’s difficult—there is considerable resistance, and the two dials are so close together that it’s hard to get a good grip.

Alternatively, you can unplug the air fryer and let the timer run out on its own. But be warned, it will still emit a loud ding when it hits zero, even if the machine is unplugged.

The version with a touchscreen is easier to turn off, but it has a cluttered display. If you want to avoid the somewhat-hard-to-turn dials, you can opt for the version of this air fryer that has a touchscreen instead. But the display can be hard to activate with greasy fingers, and the display is cluttered with unhelpful presets.

The basket is heavy and poorly balanced. All of the Philips air fryers we tested have particularly heavy baskets compared to those of other models. The weight also tips away from the handle toward the front of the basket, making holding it a strain. This Philips model is no exception, but the empty basket is more than a pound lighter than the one in the similarly-sized Philips Premium. If you want a full-size air fryer with a lightweight basket, consider the Cosori LE.

The Philips Premium Airfryer. The machine is slightly rounded with a flat top and has a shiny black surface.
Photo: Connie Park

Upgrade pick

This air fryer cooked the fastest and most evenly of any air fryer we tested, and the interface, with a smooth dial and manual buttons, is one of the easiest to use.

Buying Options

The Philips Premium Airfryer HD9741 is one of the best pod-shaped air fryers we’ve tested, cooking faster and more evenly than most of its competitors. Based on our measurements, the Premium Airfryer has a capacity of just over 3 quarts, about the same as our top pick. Its interface is simple and unfussy, with no fickle touchscreen or hard-to-turn dials. But it has a heavy basket, and it is pricey, often listed around $250. If you don’t mind the added weight and you catch this on sale, it is an exceptionally effective air fryer.

It cooks more evenly than any other model we tested. It produced the crispiest, most evenly browned food of any pod-shaped air fryer we tested. While the Philips Airfryer L also crisped food evenly and quickly, the Premium was able to crisp trays of nuggets with minimal overdone edges and baskets of nearly identical fries.

It has a streamlined interface. The cook time and temperature are both easily accessed through a single dial on the control panel. Changing the controls doesn’t cause the machine to beep loudly with every adjustment. There are only four preprogrammed settings, avoiding a cluttered display.

The square basket is roomy and easy to remove and insert. It glided shut smoothly and didn’t require any extra force or support to close with one hand.

The Philips Premium Airfryer’s streamlined control panel is intuitive to use. Photo: Connie Park

But the basket is uncomfortably heavy. It weighs 3.7 pounds when empty—significantly more than any of the other baskets we tested in this size range—and feels quite cumbersome when you’re holding it in one hand. Many air fryer baskets are poorly balanced, and this one feels particularly so, with the bulk of the basket’s weight tipping away from the handle.

And the basket is particularly hard to clean. The wire mesh of the inner basket on the Premium is a beast to clean, trapping oil and food in a frustrating web of not-so-nonstick metal. Philips air fryers contain an outer shell, an inner basket, and a “fat reducer,” an extra layer in the bottom of the outer shell that is really just another thing to clean, so we don’t use it.

If you include all parts of the basket, it could take around 10 minutes to get this thing clean. The basket is dishwasher safe, but the dishwasher will likely damage the nonstick coating.

In our tests, bits of food stuck to the Philips Premium’s “fryer” basket, and a pool of grease sat at the bottom of the container, which made it more cumbersome to clean. Photo: Sarah Kobos

This is one of the noisiest air fryers we tested. The convection fan is about as loud as a hair dryer.

It is expensive. This model is sometimes listed for around $250, which is pricier than another one of our favorite air-frying devices, the Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven TOB-260N1. The Cuisinart toaster oven outperforms this air fryer and can do a wider range of cooking tasks with more precision, though it takes longer to do so. We’d most recommend the Philips Premium air fryer when you can catch it on sale, which happens a few times a year, often in the fall.

The Premium Airfryer comes with a two-year warranty. This is a year longer than the Instant Vortex Mini 4-in-1’s warranty, but we haven’t had great luck getting a hold of Philips customer service.

The Instant Mini Vortex air fryer. It has a matte black surface and a shiny top. It is more angular and widens at the base.
Photo: Connie Park

Also great

The Instant Vortex Mini is small, powerful, and one of the cheapest models we tested. While the wee basket can fit only one serving of food at a time, the machine circulates heat fairly well and manages to cook food without dehydrating it.

Buying Options

The Instant Vortex Mini 4-in-1 is a 2-quart air fryer that packs a big punch, with a diminutive size and solid cooking results.

The Vortex Mini lives up to its name, with a compact footprint. This air fryer is about two-thirds the size of our other picks, making it ideal for use in small kitchens or dorm rooms. It is lightweight and easy to store away, or it could be left out on the counter unobtrusively. But if you want to cook more than one to two portions of food at a time, you should opt for a larger air fryer.

Our three picks for best airfryer displayed side by side in front of a beige background.
The Vortex Mini (center) is about two-thirds the size of the Premium Airfryer (left) and Airfryer L (right), and 3 to 5 pounds lighter. Photo: Marki Williams

It cooks fast and evenly enough. The Vortex Mini cooked just as fast as the Philips air fryers, with consistently good, exceptionally crispy results. It didn’t cook quite as evenly as our other picks, but given the small size of its shallow, square basket, the food came out surprisingly crisp without tasting dehydrated.

The display on the Instant Mini is above a dial. White numbers show the temp and there are buttons for basic functions.
The preprogrammed buttons and dial on the Instant Vortex Mini are intuitive to use. Photo: Connie Park

The interface is streamlined and easy to use. It has only four buttons: air fry, roast, bake, and reheat, along with a simple dial that can be used to adjust the cook time and temperature. The Vortex Mini also helpfully makes a light beeping noise halfway through the cook time to remind you to flip the food, regardless of the setting.

The detachable baskets belonging to our three picks for best airfryer, displayed side by side in front of a beige background.
The basket of the Philips Premium Airfryer (center) is the heaviest and most difficult to clean of our picks, and it’s just a square half-inch larger than the basket of the Philips Airfryer L (left). Though it has less volume, the Vortex Mini’s basket (right) is shallow and flat, but it can still fit a decent amount of food. Photos: Marki Williams

The basket is surprisingly roomy, but it is still mini. Like our other picks, the square basket of the Vortex Mini increases the machine’s capacity. We were able to fit four large wings in the basket, only a couple fewer than what we could fit in larger air fryers. Still, this air fryer is best for someone cooking a meal for one or sharing a snack with one other person.

The detachable basket and removable tray belonging to the Instant Vortex Mini 4-in-1 airfryer.
The Instant Vortex Mini’s diminutive basket has a removable tray. Photos: Marki Williams

This little air fryer is quiet, easy to clean, and easy to use. The basket is easy to take out and put in, and the Vortex Mini was also the quietest of our three picks. We found it easy to clean, too (even after cooking sticky chicken wings).

The Instant Vortex Mini comes with a one-year limited warranty. To replace parts, you’d have to contact Instant Brands’s customer support team (but the company doesn’t sell replacement trays at this time).

If you want an air fryer with a lighter basket and can live with less crispness: The $100 Cosori LE used to be our budget pick, but our new top pick performs significantly better and costs only about $20 more. However, if you’re concerned about the weight of the Philips baskets, this may be the air fryer for you. The Cosori basket is roomy and weighs around 2 pounds while empty, making it the lightest of any full-size air fryer we tested. Though it still suffers from the wonky balance of most air fryer baskets, it feels better in the hand than those of the (otherwise better-performing) Philips air fryers. Be warned: The tray inside the basket can sometimes fall out, which is startling and could be dangerous when the tray is hot.

The trade-off for the lighter basket is just okay results. The Cosori made great chicken wings but suffered from uneven crisping, producing some soggy nugs and a few floppy fries. The Cosori also struggled to reach set temperatures and fluctuated below temperature.

We do appreciate the sleek, matte look of this air fryer. And while the touchscreen was sometimes unresponsive, we appreciated the large text on the screen.

If you want a pretty good full-size air fryer under $100 and have the patience for wonky controls: We thought the 4-quart Dreo Aircrisp Pro Air Fryer did some of the best cooking among our finalists—the food it produced was consistently crisp but not dehydrated. Though the machine is cylindrical, the basket itself is square, and it fits more food than a round basket might.

But we struggled with this air fryer’s exasperating interface. The preprogrammed settings are identified by inscrutable graphics that require a manual to decipher. The Dreo also boots up to a default 380 ºF and 20-minute cook time. Adjusting the time requires you to do so minute by minute, and the buttons make loud, annoying beeps every time. If you accidentally start a program, you have to shut the machine off to reset it, the process for which is in itself unclear (spoiler: hold down the power button for three seconds). While we liked the food that came out of it, interacting with the machine put a damper on the results.

We have found that most Philips air fryers crisp well, but the larger ones take longer. Such is true for the Philips 5000 Series Airfryer XL HD9280/91, a 6.5-quart air fryer with a roomy (though heavy) basket, a larger footprint, and a more bulbous look than the other two Philips air fryers we recommend in this guide. It took longer to crisp, usually requiring around five extra minutes to get almost-as-good results. This air fryer has Wi-Fi connectivity, so you can set the temperature and cook time and turn off the machine using an app on your phone—but you have to press start on the machine itself. At this size and price, you would likely be better served by an air fryer toaster oven.

Because of its size, the nearly 7-quart Cosori Dual Blaze Smart Air Fryer took longer to cook than other air fryers and produced mushy and oily results.

Cuisinart makes one of our favorite convection toaster ovens, so we had high hopes for the Cuisinart Air-200. But the Air-200 ran about 30 to 50 degrees cooler than its set temperature, and it produced uneven trays of nuggets and fries, with some totally burnt and others mushy and floppy.

We don’t recommend Instant Pot air fryer lids or other pressure-cooker air fryers as a main air-frying vehicle, as these often have even smaller internal capacities than pod-shaped air fryers, take up even more space on the counter, and lack the drawer and basket design that makes pod air fryers so convenient. The Instant Pot Duo Crisp is no different, with a small tray and a substantial footprint. It did a fine job air frying but produced fries, nuggets, and wings that were dryer than the ones from pod air fryers.

The Ultrean 4.2 Quart Air Fryer had noisy, hard-to-press buttons and a basket that was hard to insert, and it took up too much space.

The Hamilton Beach 3.7 Quart/3.5 Liter Digital Air Fryer can barely fit a full-size meal, and it didn’t deliver much crispness.

The 3-quart and 6-quart versions of the Dash Deluxe Air Fryer and the 2.6-quart Dash Tasti-Crisp Air Fryer did a poor job of maintaining a set temperature and cooked the most unevenly of anything we tested in an earlier round.

We liked the spacious square basket of the Instant Vortex 6-quart Air Fryer and the option to mute the beeps, but it has a poor user interface, with difficult-to-press buttons.

The ​​Instant Vortex Plus Dual Basket Air Fryer features two 4-quart baskets that can cook two separate portions of food at the same time. Neither basket gets as hot as it needs to be, so food comes out soggy.

The Ninja AF101 Air Fryer has a flat, removable tray liner in its basket to keep food from sitting in oil, but the tray falls out when you turn food out of the basket, which could potentially cause burns. It also runs too hot and fits less food than our picks.

The Ninja AF161 Max XL Air Fryer also ran too hot. All of the food we tested in this machine was overcooked on the outside and undercooked inside, with varying levels of dehydration.

The Ninja DZ201 Foodi 2-Basket Air Fryer, with two 4-quart baskets, is the other dual-basket model that we tested. It was easier to use than its Instant counterpart, but it also didn’t run hot enough in either basket to crisp or cook food well.

The Black+Decker 2L Purifry Air Fryer HF110SBD was the best budget pod-shaped model we tried back in 2017, but we now prefer the Instant Vortex Mini, which costs less and cooks more food better.

Unlike most air fryers, the 7-quart Gourmia GAF798 Digital Air Fryer required preheating (probably due to its large size), and the preheat cycle restarts if you add more time. We also didn’t like the basket design, with a tray in the bottom of the bucket that falls out and finger holes large enough for french fries to fall through.

The Oster DuraCeramic Air Fryer took more than twice as long to cook fries than our top pick, and the fries were still not crispy enough.

The french fries we cooked in the GoWISE USA GW22621 turned out badly burned at the top of the cooker and undercooked at the bottom. Also, when you reinsert the basket, the air fryer slides across the counter because it doesn’t have enough weight or grip to stay in place.

This article was edited by Marilyn Ong and Marguerite Preston.

  1. Rebecca Abbot and Jennifer West, authors of Air Frying Foodie, Zoom interview, September 1, 2022

Meet your guides

Mace Dent Johnson

Mace Dent Johnson is a staff writer on the kitchen team at Wirecutter. Their background is in creative writing and academic research, and they are always thinking about food.

Caira Blackwell

Caira Blackwell is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter covering sleep and mattresses. Her work has previously been published in Okayplayer, The Knockturnal, and Nylon magazine, and her book A Lullaby for the End of the World is available on Amazon.

Michael Sullivan

Michael Sullivan has been a staff writer on the kitchen team at Wirecutter since 2016. Previously, he was an editor at the International Culinary Center in New York. He has worked in various facets of the food and restaurant industry for over a decade.

Further reading

  • Our three picks for best air fryer toaster oven, with one of them stacked on the others forming a pyramid.

    The Best Air Fryer Toaster Oven

    by Michael Sullivan

    If you want an appliance that’s more versatile than a pod-shaped air fryer, we recommend the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro.

  • A Cuisinart and a Panasonic toaster oven, shown side by side with toasted white bread slices in them.

    The Best Toaster Oven

    by Michael Sullivan

    We’ve been testing toaster ovens since 2013 and have two favorites: the compact Panasonic FlashXpress Toaster Oven and the large Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven.

  • Onion rings frying in the Cuisinart fryer

    The Best Deep Fryer

    by Michael Sullivan

    After 60 hours of research and frying, we think the Cuisinart CDF-200 is the best deep fryer. But you might be better off with a Lodge Dutch Oven.

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