The mission of America’s Test Kitchen Reviews is to find the best equipment and ingredients for the home cook through rigorous, hands-on testing. We stand behind our winners so much that we even put our seal of approval on them. If the heating element gets dirty, you can wipe it with a damp cloth when the unit is turned off, cooled, and unplugged. None of the Cosori models on our list were included in the February 2023 recall.
The instant vortex has a 1-year limited warranty and replacement parts can be purchased separately. This small model’s stature and footprint make it easy to store, but it’s large enough to cook small batches of frozen foods and our recipes evenly and quickly. Its nonstick interior was easy to clean, but its analog temperature and timer dials weren’t as precise as digital controls.
It comes in different colors making it more attractive to different buyers and it’s also much cheaper. In addition to all the standard information you can read off the website or the box, here are some other observations and features to consider that we have learned after 2 years of regular usage. The good news is that you can easily turn the beeping sound of which is what we have done. Simply press the “Time” and “Temp” button at the same time for 3 seconds. We rarely have issue with food sticking – but as the tray gets older and with regular cleaning, the coating does start to breakdown on the metallic tray.
In this section, we’ll breakdown some of the most obvious pros and cons to the Vortex® 6qt air fryer. These are all based on first-hand experience after using this air fryer for 2+ years. When you put food on multiple trays at at time, it doesn’t cook evenly, so you must swap the trays halfway through your cooking time. Getting the rotisserie basket in the first few times is the hardest part.
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.
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 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.
We enjoyed using this machine as a multicooker, achieving great pressure-cooked and slow-cooked beef stew and baked beans. This flip-top model had an interface with buttons that were intuitive to use. It had an instant pot duo nova exposed heating element on the inside of the lid, making us a little nervous we’d bump it and get burned. It had a small capacity, only fitting one 15-ounce bag of french fries or two chicken cutlets at a time.