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Keep hearing about the joys of air frying? Providing a faster and healthier way to cook fried foods with little to no oil, an air fryer has become something of a kitchen staple. It works much like a convection oven to circulate hot air around your food—only it’s more compact and increases your time savings. Think guilt-free crispy chicken, homemade fries, and doughnuts that are not only simple to make but come with easier clean-up compared to using a traditional deep-fat fryer.
With smaller capacity interiors to heat and shorter preheating times, an air fryer can be a quicker way to cook than your standard oven—potentially saving you money off your energy bills if used wisely. (Just make sure it’s large enough to cook what you need, otherwise you’ll be using it multiple times—which will defeat its energy-saving purpose.) Multifunctional in design, some air fryers come loaded with preset cooking modes for baking, roasting, dehydrating, grilling, and reheating. They can tackle a range of meat, fish, and vegetables effectively, as well as sweet treats: steak and sweet potato fries, homemade apple crisps, a warm banana loaf. Here are WIRED's top picks to suit a range of ingredients and price points.
Check out more of WIRED's top kitchen tech and accessory guides, including the Best Electric Kettles, Best Latte and Cappuccino Machines, Best Chef's Knives, and the Best Gear for Small Kitchens.
Update June 2023: We've added a new pick: the Cosori Lite air fryer.
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Much like a kettle, blender, or coffee maker, air fryers are designed to be a permanent fixture on your worktop, so if space is tight in your kitchen, you may want to carefully consider the measurements before you buy. The choice of size and finish is wide but some designs can be bulky, which makes them difficult to store when not in use. Remember to check the cooking capacity before you buy to ensure the air fryer will cater to the number of people you’re cooking for—a design with a 6-quart/5.7-liter capacity is ideal for making four to six portions at a time.
Standard air fryers come with a cooking drawer with a basket and grill plate inside. The drawer can be pulled out midway so you can check on your food and give it a shake to make sure it’s cooking evenly. You can also find one-pot multi-cookers that come with an air-fryer setting. These tend to have a lift-up lid that reveals a cooking pot where you can air-fry your food but also prepare stews and casseroles. Then there are those air fryers that look more like small microwaves and have the capacity to rotisserie a whole chicken, cook a pizza, toast muffins, or reheat food. The most flexible designs have a wide temperature range and settings for specific tasks such as roasting, baking, reheating, and dehydrating, on top of your standard air-fry mode.
Ninja’s latest Speedi can cook fries with up to 75 percent less fat than a traditional deep fryer, but also offers so much more than your standard air fryer. Finished in a subtle gray colorway, it sits compactly on the worktop and has a fold-up lid that opens to reveal a deep 6-quart capacity cooking dish. The design has a 12-in-1 functionality, which includes preset cooking modes for searing and sautéing, steaming, baking, roasting, and, for anyone feeling particularly adventurous, a sous-vide setting. The beauty of the Ninja is that you can also use it to cook one-pot meals in just 15 minutes—and it comes with a recipe inspiration booklet to get you started.
I was impressed at just how neatly the Speedi Rapid Cooker and Air Fryer fit onto a kitchen worktop. It’s low enough to be placed neatly under the worktop, although you will need to pull it out and give it plenty of room to let off steam while in use. It has the premium finish you’d expect from a Ninja appliance and is very easy to operate and wash clean with warm, soapy water. You can use this for everything, from air-frying single foods to preparing complete one-pot meals. I particularly love the ingenious use of space inside, which includes a rack with adjustable legs that make it easy to raise when needed. This means you can prep rice and pasta on the base of the dish while you cook meat, vegetables, fish, and the like at the top. In other words, you can cook a complete meal in one so it’s ready to serve and enjoy straightaway.
With its 6-quart capacity, this air fryer is a great size for large households as it has the ability to cook up to six portions at a time. There are six cooking modes onboard: air-fry, roast, broil, bake, reheat, and dehydrate. It promises a perfectly golden finish every time and doesn’t disappoint, with crispy, tender results. What I love most about the Instant Vortex, though, is its large viewing window that lights up at the touch of a button. This means you don’t need to open the cooking drawer to check on your food and interrupt the cooking cycle midway through. I was able to see just how golden my homemade chips were turning and monitor the chicken tenders so I knew when they needed turning over and were crisp and ready to eat.
At 95 degrees to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature range on this air fryer is wide, which makes it good for both foods that require a lower temperature—ideal for dehydrating apple crisps, for example—to those that require a higher heat to give them a bit of crunch. And built-in “odor erase” filters reduce cooking smells that can linger. This comes into its own whether you’re using it in an open-plan kitchen and living area or have it on in a small kitchen. The Instant Pot app is great for inspiration, with recipe ideas such as Air Fryer Hawaiian Ham & Cheese Stromboli to Air Fryer Breakfast Bombs with bacon and cheese.
What makes this Cosori air fryer stand out is that it can be monitored and controlled remotely using a smartphone or tablet, as well as via its digital control panel. Set-up was simple, and after downloading the Cosori VeSync app, I was able to pair up with ease over Wi-Fi. While, for safety reasons, I couldn’t use the app to start the air fryer, I was able to use it to check the cooking status and remotely adjust the temperature. You can also use the app to search through a wide range of air fryer recipes, such as teriyaki-glazed onigiri and black currant Irish drop scones.
While the Cosori Pro doesn’t have a viewing window, I really like the sleek, black design, which feels premium in its finish and sits neatly on the countertop. The cooking drawer slides out smoothly, and the handle doesn’t get hot while in use—although the sides get a little hot, so be sure the air fryer has plenty of space. It offers a flexible temperature range, from 175 degrees Fahrenheit to a powerful 400, with 12 preset cooking modes. The cooking space in the drawer is deep and wide, so I was able to place eight portions of chicken tenders inside, which needed 15 minutes at 400 degrees before they looked golden and ready to eat. Banana bread also did well—the Cosori dish is large enough to fit a round baking tin. Within 25 minutes on a 320-degree setting, the bread was evenly cooked on the outside and nicely spongy on the inside.
Having tried a wide range of bulky countertop kitchen appliances, it’s always a pleasure to come across a design that doesn’t take up too much space. The Ninja Air Fryer Max XL is compact enough that I wasn’t scrabbling around for usable countertop space to carry out other tasks such as prepping vegetables. The control panel doesn’t have a smart app to accompany it, but it is refreshingly simple to use and clearly illustrated so you can easily tailor the time and temperatures to suit your food. You can choose settings that include max crisp, air fry, air roast, air broil, bake, reheat, and dehydrate.
I found that the 5.5-quart, ceramic-coated, non-stick basket and crisper plate did well to make around four portions of frozen fries in one go on the air-fry setting. The results were even and satisfying after 20 minutes of cooking at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The max crisp setting is perfect for making homemade chips with a nice amount of crunch at a super toasty temperature up to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. (Just coast evenly in oil and give the basket a shake a few times.) Keen to test the Bake setting, I made a chocolate cake using a small circular tin. To convert recipes from a conventional oven, Ninja suggests that you reduce the temperature by 25 degrees Fahrenheit and preheat for a few minutes before baking. The bake setting defaulted to 325 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 minutes, which worked well with the cake rising evenly. After an extra five minutes, the inside cooked through without the top of the cake burning.
I’ve tried a host of different air fryers over the last six months and the Cosori Lite really stood out for me—most notably because it isn’t too bulky on the worktop and its refreshing milk white with orange trim finish really lifts the style in my kitchen. (You can also find gray or sage finishes). Looks aside, the air fryer comes packed with time-saving and convenient features. On its digital control panel, Cosori gives you pre-set cooking options for foods that do well in the air fryer with modes for Chicken, Fries, Bacon, Steak and Veggies. I’m a big fan of fish and while this is missing from the panel, this isn’t a problem as it’s easy to manually choose a temperature to suit your food—the fryer reaches a toasty 446°F for that crispy, fried finish.
Other handy settings on the control panel include a ‘Shake’ button that reminds you to open the basket and shake your fries mid-way through the cooking cycle—to make sure they are evenly coated in oil and come out crispy on the outside, yet light and fluffy on the inside. I also love the preheat button on this air fryer—it heats the basket for a few minutes so that your food goes in with a better chance of coming out perfectly cooked.
While the 4-quart capacity is modest, I think it’s great for up to four portions—depending on whether you’re cooking chicken tenders, a batch of fries or getting more adventurous dehydrating apple crisps at a lower temp. It can also be paired with the VeSync app so you can control the device with your smartphone while you’re multi-tasking around the house—it won’t start the air fryer, but you can use it to see how long is left and browse recipe ideas. Always a bonus when you’re stuck on what to cook on a Monday night.
Similar in style and shape to a countertop microwave oven, this brushed stainless steel Breville air fryer comes with a drop-down door that opens to reveal a large 1-cubic-foot interior. It’s roomy enough to fit large whole cuts of meat and can even take on a 14-pound turkey, or air-fry at least six portions of fries at a time on the interior tray. I found the LCD control panel here particularly easy to navigate. It comes with a dial that makes it easy to scroll through the 13 cooking functions on offer, with precise settings for everything from toasting, roasting, and warming, to cooking a pizza, reheating, making cookies, and even slow cooking.
The wide temperature offering ranges from 80 to 480 degrees Fahrenheit, and I was pleased with just how well this air fryer could tackle a range of foods with different temperature requirements, such as fries and chicken wings as well as pizza and toast—producing even, crispy results, every time. While the Breville comes with a selection of its own accessories, including a pizza pan and mesh basket rack for dehydrating and air frying, what’s great about this design is that it’s large enough to add your own pans inside—such as a cast-iron Le Creuset dish for when you’re slow cooking food. While I found it quite easy to wipe clean, you do need to clean the interior regularly after each use—particularly around the element area where the grease can set in if left.
★ A smarter alternative: Breville's Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro ($545) (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is very similar in its offering. If you pay around $100 more than the Smart Oven Pro, you can use a dedicated smart app to monitor food while it's cooking.
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