But as our testers discovered, the actual capacity is often smaller than claimed.

Most air fryers have a small capacity, ranging from 2 to 5.8 quarts. As you try to discern which air fryer is best for you, consider how much space you have for it and how much you want to cook at once. Air-fried foods, of course, lack that rich deep-fried-fat taste.īut if you don’t mind that-and simply hope to cook (or reheat) food fast-then air fryers may indeed be worth considering. “You can tell the difference,” says Ciufo. However, no one was fooled into thinking that the food was deep-fried. “Even when we held cooking times and temperatures constant, the results were very similar, with no discernible differences in taste,' said Larry Ciufo, the Consumer Reports test engineer who oversees air fryer testing. In general, they found that air fryers were all quite capable of turning out nicely cooked food. So are air fryers worth it? In the Consumer Reports lab, our testers ran through more than 50 models to reach our latest air fryer ratings. That said, some air fryer models have a 'reheat' function that can handle a broader range of foods. For instance, both a toaster oven and an air fryer will cook and reheat tater tots, but the air fryer will crisp up the outer layer more quickly and evenly (and without you having to turn them midway). Both machines will toast a bagel, but you’ll probably get better results in the toaster oven-unless you prefer bagels with a crispier-than-usual surface. But you can actually use an air fryer to cook almost anything you’d throw into the toaster oven or stove, or deep-fry it’s just that an air fryer adds a kick of crispiness to anything it cooks (without the added fat). At first glance, these cookers seem limited to finger foods (fries, certainly, along with chicken wings, chicken nuggets, even pizza bites).

A fan circulates hot air to quickly cook food in the basket from the outside in. These countertop cookers we call air fryers don’t fry food at all.

In fact, the air fryer market is predicted to be worth more than $2 billion by 2030, according to MarketWatch. Crispy fries without all the oil? That’s the golden promise of air fryers, and it might explain why, in the U.S., the market for these appliances continues to grow year over year.

Dash 3 quart air fryer