Other Air Fryers We Like
Typhur Dome Air Fryer for $450: The Typhur dome air fryer is a reimagined fryer with a broad base and a shallow basket that cooks with “blazing speed,” WIRED commerce director Martin Cizmar noted when naming it one of the best gifts you could give a father in a previous version of that guide. It’s far from cheap, but the design means that crispy food arrives on an abbreviated schedule, including crispy wings in 14 minutes, and “fried hard” wings in a couple more. Typhur has just released a revamped Dome 2 we’re looking forward to testing soon. The original is already impressive.
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Instant Pot Vortex Slim for $130: This 6-quart fryer has nearly the same excellent performance, and much of the same functionality, that we like in our top Instant Pot pick. But its lack of cooking window and odor-erase filter keep it lesser in our hearts. That said, the Slim’s got a slimmer and deeper profile, about an inch less broad than the Vortex Plus. In some kitchens, this inch will matter.
Philips 3000 Series XXL at $150: This Philips is a 7.6-quart air fryer with an interesting topside viewing window and a large capacity that crisps alllllmost as well as the much-smaller 2000-series fryer we like as our favorite budget pick. It also sports the same sort of fiddly, beepy, control panel. Still: At its size, big enough for a whole chicken, this a high-performing basket fryer that keeps reliable temperature. Hard to come by.
Cosori 9-Quart Dual Air Fryer With Wider Double Basket for $170: This was a previous pick among large, dual-basket fryers, prized for its intuitive controls and a dual-basket syncing feature that’s now become common among two-basket fryers. We now recommend the Instant Pot 9-quart fryer, among large fryers.
Air Fryers We Don’t Recommend
Photograph: Matthew Korfhage
Ninja Doublestack XL 2-Basket for $220: On the one hand, this 10-quart Ninja offers a dramatic amount of cooking space with a relatively small footprint, plopping two 5-quart baskets atop each other. Each basket also has a crisper rack, offering the potential of putting together a four-component meal. We had good results placing wing flats atop the crisper, and letting them drip onto the drums beneath for a mix of extra-crispy and extra-juicy wings. But this stacked design also means putting the heating elements and fans in the back of each drawer rather than the top, leading to uneven cooking throughout the basket and equally uneven air circulation. Cooking with multiple zones also required difficult and often confusing recipe conversions, and cooktimes stretched quite long.
Cosori DualBlaze 6.8-Quart for $180 and Cosori TurboBlaze 6-Quart for $120 are a bit like Jack Sprat and his wife. The DualBlaze runs too hot, and the TurboBlaze runs too cold. WIRED previously had the DualBlaze as a top pick, in part for a phone app that’s now a common feature across the category. On recent testing, we’re now more concerned about the wonky thermostat.
Zwilling Electrics 4-Quart Air Fryer for $100: Contributing WIRED reviewer Emily Peck liked the low profile on this Zwilling, under a foot tall. But the lack of a start button separate from the on/off switch, and strange preset recipes placed it off our to-buy list compared to an also-svelte, lower-priced 4-quart Philips.
Ninja Doublestack XL Countertop Oven for $350: This doublestack looked like a versatile design, dropping a toaster oven atop an already spacious air fryer oven—with a clever door design allowing the compartments to open together or separately. The reality was disappointing. The shut-off button on the top oven malfunctioned, meaning I had to turn the power off completely to shut off the top oven. And temperatures were all over the map. If the temp at the back of the main oven was 400 degrees Fahrenheit, the temp near the door might be 345, leading to wildly uneven cooking. And while Ninja touts FlavorSeal technology to keep odors and aromas from traveling between the top and bottom oven, the same was not true of heat: Heat from the bottom oven freely traveled into the top oven and vice versa. Also, toast burned even at medium-low settings.
