It boasts 12 settings, including the typical chicken, prawn and vegetable options we’ve seen on almost every device, alongside cake, bread and dehydrate, and you can tailor the setting using the temperature and time dial too. Pressure cookers with air frying capability can also provide a slew of cooking functions beyond air frying and pressure cooking, including rice, slow cook, sauté and even yogurt or dehydrate.

The top performers in our tests produced food with a crispy texture and a moist interior and offered easy-to-read, intuitive controls. Some models, like Ninja Foodi Dual Zone, have a second cooking compartment that allows you to cook two different types of food (at different temperatures) at the same time, so you could make steak and chips without having to mix them together. When using your air fryer, there are certain steps we’d recommend you take for excellent results – after reading the instruction manual, of course. If you want to learn a little more about how air fryers work, and what benefits they have compared to a standard oven, then have a read of our handy explainer here: What is an air fryer?

Ease of cleaning: You need to wash your air fryer after every use, so you might want to consider investing in one that has dishwasher-safe parts. We found that the air fryer was quicker to heat up, cooked faster and used less energy, although the quality of cooking was slightly worse than in either of the ovens. An air fryer is a mini convection oven that is designed to recreate the taste and texture of deep-fried food, without the need for boiling it in fat.

We always list power cable length in our reviews because it can determine how close you'll need to place your air fryer to a socket. You can keep an eye on the cooking time using the app on your phone, and it will let you know once cooking is finished.We could then send those recipes directly to the air fryer, so we didn’t have to input the temperature and time ourselves. The temperature is also set via a dial and doesn’t offer many options, but we found the Dash was still a good pick since we use its maximum temperature of 400˚F to air fry most foods.

Thanks to the quick air circulation, cooking requires almost no oil and there is no unpleasant smell. Right now, countertop cooking appliances are becoming bigger, bulkier and more feature-laden as they take on a multitude of cooking tasks. Some, such as the Philips Viva Airfryer and Russell Hobbs Purifry, have manual dials that you turn to set the time, but most other air fryers, including the Tefal Actifry, have digital timers instead. When we test air fryers, we evaluate their performance and ease of use by air frying frozen french fries, homemade french fries and frozen mozzarella sticks.Chicken, chips and chopped-up veg cooked much faster and ended up a lot tastier and crispier compared to when cooking in the other air fryer models. During testing, one portion of frozen potato lattices came out perfectly crisp and golden in just six minutes, compared to the recommended 15-minute oven cooking time stated on the bag. Go to our best multi cookers guide to see test results for multi cookers from from Ninja, Tefal, Russell Hobbs and more.