The Hamilton Beach, Panasonic’s FlashXpress and Breville Mini Smart Oven were among the top finishers with mostly even cooking and a solid medium color. To ensure the fat renders and the wings crisp, air fry chicken wings at two separate temperatures. It’s important to eat your veggies, and while there are many ways to cook them—the air fryer isn’t a good choice for leafy green vegetables, hamilton beach toaster oven such as spinach, bok choy, Swiss chard, and kale. The one exception to this rule is that air fryers are great for making veggie chips from these types of vegetables. In February Cosori issued a recall of 21 air fryer models following incidents of them catching fire, melting, overheating, or smoking. Our budget pick, the Cosori Pro LE Air Fryer, isn’t part of the recall.
Air frying and convection cooking both work similarly in the sense that they both use a fan to circulate hot air. Air fryers, however, typically have heating elements that are more concentrated and located on the top, while most convection ovens work with the same heaters already built into an oven or toaster oven. Air fryers also typically have a larger fan that works quicker and is positioned on top of the heating elements versus a convection oven with a smaller fan located in the back or side of the oven. Ultimately, the best air fryer toaster ovens heat up quickly and make crispier food in less time than convection ovens.
Use your trusty air fryer to make the best (and easiest) pork chops of your life. Trust us — once you try this air fryer pork chop recipe, you’ll never go back to your old method again. Inside the Pro LE basket, there is a removable tray, which, during testing, fell out when we flipped the basket upside down to transfer food to a plate (this was also the case with hamilton beach the Ninja Air Fryer AF101). But when we later ordered another model to photograph, we didn’t have this problem. The Pro LE comes with a two-year warranty, but Cosori does not offer any replacement parts, so you’re out of luck if your outer basket handle breaks or you lose the tray. Chances are your beloved air fryer doesn’t look as good or work as well as it used.
The Instant Mini Vortex 4-in-1 is a 2-quart air fryer that packs a big punch. While the Mini Vortex didn’t cook as evenly as the Premium Airfryer, we did think that, given the small size of its shallow, square basket, the food came out surprisingly crisp without tasting dehydrated. The Mini Vortex also cooked just as fast as the Premium Airfryer, with consistently good results. We also found the Philips Premium Airfryer’s basket to be the most seamless to insert into the machine. The square shape of the Premium Airfryer’s 2.75-quart basket also allows a bit more space than round designs with similar capacities, which means you can fit four chicken thighs or wings in the basket versus three.
The downside, the manual warns, is that things may take longer to cook (though the lid has some holes in it, it’s essentially creating a barrier between your food and the appliance’s heating element and fan). Go from air frying chicken on Friday to cooking a whole rotisserie chicken on Sunday. Additional settings for pizza, toast, bake and broil add versatility and have a beep at the end of the cycle.
This air fryer also isn’t as much of an eyesore as some machines we’ve tried over the years, so it won’t look like an alien spaceship has landed on your kitchen counter. Air fryer toaster ovens tend to look like larger versions of your classic toaster oven, but come with all the functionality of a toaster oven, air fryer and even roaster combined. If your countertop already houses a toaster oven and you’re wishing you had space for an air fryer, consider this the ideal more-than-2-for-1 upgrade. This under-$125 model impressed us during testing, especially when it came to air frying. It has a basic control panel with three knobs that are easy to operate and a small footprint that’s still large enough to fit a 12-inch frozen pizza. In our tests, it was one of the few that was able to bake an evenly melted pizza in addition to making evenly colored toast.
Plus, when stored upright, the bottom of the oven can be released for cleaning so you can easily wipe it down. Baking them in the oven just never gets that full crisp you get when deep frying, and don’t even get me started about the microwave. In truth, I don’t find toaster oven cooking programs very helpful, and I rarely use them. Since every brand, be it frozen pizza, waffles or mozzarella sticks, vary in size and density, it’s generally best to follow the instructions on the box.
Toasters are good for more than just breakfast, however — these compact ovens can toast, bake, and broil and reheat with the best of them. After testing several models for speed and evenness, Panasonic’s speedy FlashXpress turned in the best overall stats to earn its spot as the best toaster in 2023. The Ultrean 4.2 Quart Air Fryer is one of the less expensive models we tested, and it happened to provide one of the least pleasant user experiences. The buttons were noisy and hard to press, and the basket was difficult to shove in without pushing the entire air fryer back on the counter.
This model produced golden-brown toast with good texture and churned out a half-a-bag of frozen fries in minutes. The air fry basket can be a bit tough to remove, so take that into account and use an oven mitt when reaching for your food. Bone-in skin-on chicken breasts came out with moist meat and crunchy skin after 45 minutes and we found store-bought sugar cookie dough baked well according to package instructions. While it does come with fewer presets than the Breville, this model is sure to do the trick for those who want to expand their air frying horizons without sacrificing the functionality of a toaster oven. The Cosori Pro LE Air Fryer was the best model we tested for around $100.
So yeah, it’s really not good for us to eat fried foods, and we hardly ever do. Our assessment of cleaning the air fryer includes both baskets, the interior of the machine and exterior surfaces. Sharon Franke is a journalist who specializes in testing and writing about kitchen equipment. A thirty-year veteran of the hamilton beach air fryer Good Housekeeping Institute, Sharon also worked as a professional chef in New York City restaurants for seven years. In her free time, she is an avid home cook who is in the process of mastering the art of baking sour dough bread. 7-9 minutes was the perfect time for me to give them a soft texture with a crunch.