Some smart models, like the Cosori Pro Smart Air Fryer, even come with apps that pair with your phone to make the appliance accessible via voice controls (video), though we haven’t tested those features yet. An Air fryer is a kitchen appliance that cooks by circulating hot air around food. They do a fantastic job cooking up frozen foods that are meant to taste deep-fried. You can air fry french fries, crispy chicken wings, mozzarella sticks and more.
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 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.
As a staff writer at Wirecutter, I’ve researched, tested, and written about a variety of topics, including Costco’s cheap Champagne, meditation apps, and the best facial sunscreens. I spend every Thanksgiving and Christmas in the kitchen with my mom cooking for a family of 12, and have always been interested in finding new ways to speed up the process. Despite its tiny, 2-quart capacity—it was the smallest air fryer we tested—it held its own against much larger machines. Though the Instant hamilton beach air fryer Mini’s square basket is a little more than half the capacity of the Cosori’s and nearly a quart smaller than the Philips’s, it could fit a meal big enough for one hungry person (or two snacky people). Depending on the food, such as french fries (which can be stacked), brownies, or pizza, the Instant Mini can fit nearly as much as the Philips Premium or the Cosori Pro LE thanks to its wide, shallow shape. What’s more, this air fryer cooked food more evenly than most of the others we tested.
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.
These are even more inexpensive than convection toaster ovens and more suitable for small spaces. We recommend the Panasonic FlashXpress (a top pick in our guide to toaster ovens). It won’t blast food with hot air, but it can still bake relatively quickly and provide crispy results due to its small oven cavity, which is similar in size to a pod-shaped air fryer. On the flip side, one of the biggest pitfalls of pod-shaped air fryers is that their compact size really limits not only the amount of food you can cook at once but also the kind of food you can cook. Air fryers can’t fit larger items like casseroles, whole pizzas, or whole chickens.
In the range, you can find cookers that can be pre-programmed if you are someone who is always on the move. We also have different brands to choose from like Chefman, Cusinart, Ninja Foodi, Philips and more. Pick an Air fryer from our superb range and switch to oil-free, oil-less and quick frying. In our air fryer toaster oven test, the Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro made mostly even toast and a gorgeous, golden cake. The air fryer setting took longer to crisp wings than other air fryer toaster ovens we tested, but the results were similar to the results we saw in the Smart Oven Air that consumers love. It was amongst the easiest to use with an intuitive control panel; plus, the ability to follow along on the app.
This article has been reviewed since its original publish date for accuracy, pricing and availability. Our best overall air fryer was updated in 2022 to the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro. While the hamilton beach toaster oven Sure Crisp Toaster Oven has a contemporary brushed chrome housing, it pretty much has the same design as toaster ovens from decades ago.
If your air fryer is smaller you would need to cook these in batches. Assuming an energy rate of 12 cents per kilowatt hour and an average use of one hour per day, the full-size oven will add about $105 to your energy bill each year. Unplug the oven and use a toaster oven instead, and that yearly energy cost drops to $65.