Like the Ninja, it produced crispy yet tender chicken and golden brown french fries. The four preset options—air fry, bake, roast, and reheat—all performed perfectly. It is wider and heavier than the Ninja, which means it takes up more space on the countertop and is slightly less portable.
Bacon cooked on air fry was one of my favorite results in testing. It was crispy and the design of the slotted baking tray allows grease to drip through to a foil-lined crumb tray below, making cleanup nice and easy. Another great option is our best budget air fryer pick, the Beautiful 6 Quart Touchscreen Air Fryer by Drew Barrymore.
In the other air fryers we tested the bacon was blown around the inside of the cooking area by the powerful convection fan inside the air fryer, but the Instant Vortex Plus did not do this. It left us with sizzling rashers that weren’t overcooked, and five minutes was the perfect amount of cooking time. As you’ll see in the full review below, we put the Instant Vortex Plus 6 Quart 6-in 1 Air Fryer to the test cooking fries, chicken strips, bacon, and roast vegetables. We put the Instant Vortex Plus 6 Quart 6-in 1 Air Fryer with ClearCook and OdorErase to the test to see how well it makes fries, cooks bacon and roasts vegetables. We carried out this testing alongside reviews of other air fryers to compare if there was a difference in the odors and the cooking quality of these machines.
Both the insert and the basket are coated with non-stick, which means they mostly wipe clean and then need a little scrubbing with some dish soap and water. With this air fryer you get a removable air fryer insert grid which can be lifted and instant pot duo nova removed using a hook in the center of the grid. The drawer is not quite square, and we found it a little confusing to fit this inside the air fryer on the first use. Once we realised it needed to be turned 90 degrees, this was easy enough.
Although some models are known for consistent cooking across the entire air fryer basket, you still shouldn’t skip this important step. Air fryers are an entirely different beast than the countertop oil fryers you may have bought in the past. Instead of immersing baskets of your food in hot oil (which can splash out of the basket and burn you and requires heavy-duty cleanup), air fryers use a very small amount of oil to crisp your food. A light spritzing from an oil spray bottle should be all you need.
Based on my testing, the Plus Air Fryer is the best to cook food evenly and quickly. The window in the basket takes the guesswork out of knowing when your food is ready, and cleanup is a snap. If you can afford the hefty price tag, this is the air fryer to get. One of the main reasons I like air fryers is they do a great job of reheating leftovers, even better than a microwave. The Instant Vortex Plus has a reheat mode that cooks food at 280 degrees for 10 minutes. I’d put in a slice or two of leftover pizza, and well before the 10 minutes were up, the pizza was ready and just as tasty as when I purchased it.
The digital display on the Instant Vortex Plus shows the temperature once it’s preheated. It has a compact design, a stainless-steel front and an easy-to-navigate touchscreen panel up top. Release a latch inside the frame, and you can remove the door for cleaning. The Instant Pot has a devoted fan base and its maker, Instant Brands, has a line of small kitchen appliances that’s expanded over the years to include more than just pressure cookers. We’ve seen the company release an immersion circulator, a blender and multicookers. If you’re an air-fryer skeptic, maybe this on-sale model — marked down from $130 to only $90 — will change your mind.
Yes, the basket could hold that much and cook them quickly, but they came out uneven with some overly crisped and others still soft and pale, so we wouldn’t recommend it for this. Although the basket has a 6-quart capacity, you can’t cook that quantity of food at once. For reasonable cooking times and best results, you’ll only want to cook about 1 pound of food at a time or as much as can fit on the 10-inch square bottom in a single layer. During cooking you get a prompt on the screen to turn the food, which is helpful as it’s always a good idea to rearrange food during air frying to get an even result.