The components and parts feel good quality, adding to the overall value for money with this product. This dual-drawer air fryer stood out for a number of reasons but predominantly for the design features that make it enjoyably easy to use. Both drawers have interior lights that mean ingredients can be checked without opening the drawers and losing the heat inside. You can see how these air fryers performed side-by-side in cooking, design, and functionality in our head-to-head comparison post (coming soon). Not because the air fryer did a bad job – the florets have those little “buds” which can crisp and burn faster than the stalk if you aren’t careful about your cooking time and temp. Instant™ also has a 10-quart oven-style air fryer which looks similar to our Vortex® but is fundamentally different.
The air fry preset mode suggests 190°C for 20 minutes, but we took this down to 10 minutes in line with the recipe suggestion and pressed start. Inside the box you’ll find a cooking tray that sits neatly inside the non-stick cooking drawer. This ensures your food is slightly raised from the base so any grease can drain. While there isn’t the biggest gap between the tray and base of the drawer, it did create some space for the excess oil to pool while cooking. At 5.15kg (11lb 6oz), we found the moosoo air fryer Plus easy to lift out of the box and place on the worktop.
We love the extra grill feature that adds another dimension to the cooking performance. Compact and stylish with a useful viewing window, but you need to take care when handling the drawer. While there could be improvements in the drawer design, we think it works as an excellent add-on or replacement to your standard oven.
Even trimmed down and trussed up, my small chicken still dragged the bottom of the foil-lined tray on each rotation. I cooked it at 380 for 1 hour, and it came out done, but pretty average with less than crispy skin. I’d recommend lower and slower if you’re going to cook a full chicken in the Vortex Plus, or try experimenting with a smaller bird like a guinea hen if you can find one at your local butcher. The maker of the Instant Pot expands its empire with an air fryer that can do more than just serve up mozzarella sticks.
The average cook time in my best air fryer tests was 12.5 minutes, but the Plus only needed 8 minutes to produce golden and crispy fries. The fries were evenly cooked and tasted great, not too dry and not too limp. The air fryer comes with a QR-scannable guide that includes cooking times for various foods. Generally speaking, and as is the case with all air fryers, these serve as a guideline as you grow accustomed to the device. As is the case with cooking in any oven, in reality cooking times may vary depending on the size, quantity, and even quality of the ingredients being used.
Cooking foods like bacon and fried chicken imparted a significantly strong smell in the kitchen (and surrounding rooms). When we were using the machine, passersby by would immediately ask, “what’s that smell?” We took that as a bad sign. There instant vortex aren’t presets built into the machine either, like a shortcut button for standard recipes like French fries. We had to do some digging in the Instant app in order to cook certain foods with appropriate time and temperature settings.
A wider range of temperatures will give you more options for cooking different foods. Generally, fryers that can achieve higher temperatures can cook faster and brown foods more easily. Beyond temperature, take a look at the other functionalities of an air fryer.
Once started, the air fryer enters preheat mode for 3 to 4 minutes, at which point it beeps at you to add food. I found preheating unnecessary — I put the food in and started cooking right away, subtracting 3 minutes from my cooking time since the timer doesn’t count down until after the unit preheats. Emitting a cheerful jingle, the air fryer indicated a few minutes before the end of the cooking cycle that it was time to give the basked a shake, which I dutifully obeyed. Once the time had elapsed, the air fryer automatically switched off – and I was greeted with perfectly crisp and fluffy fries cooked just to my liking, alongside a moist, flavorful fillet of salmon. Having mostly tested larger air fryers, and as a single-person household, in particular, I was delighted to have the Instant Vortex Slim at my disposal.
If you use it once a week, its essentially a net cost of less than $2 a week for the whole year. Although they took an extra three minutes to cook, the consistency of these chicken strips was definitely worth the wait. We consider legibility of markings and ease of setting desired time and temperature. We really noticed the benefits of its “EvenCrisp” technology here too, as our chips came out crunchy and perfectly cooked. Just share the link, credit and link back to this copyrighted article.