My favourite air fryer isn't the newest one out - but it's still the best by miles

It won’t surprise you to know that Ninja makes my favourite air fryer. They’ve been in the business of hasty, tasty cooking for well over a decade and it’s hard to argue against their impressive designs and reasonable price points. That being said, my favourite air fryer of theirs might surprise you.

Until this year, the Ninja Foodi scored highly on any roundup of the best Njnja air fryers. However, with the Crispi, the DoubleStack and other brands launching smarter air fryers, it slipped out of the news. Well, I’m here to remind you about it, because, having used it for years, it’s not one to forget.

The Ninja Foodi does simple, large scale cooking like nobody else. The dual drawer design boasts enough capacity to feed the hungriest family and the simple settings are easy enough for anyone to understand.

Ninja Foodi Dual Zone Air Fryer review

Who would the Ninja Foodi Dual Zone Air Fryer suit?

If you want the insider scoop, this is the air fryer that all the professionals love. It’s the one our food team cooks lunch in, it’s the one our woman&home digital editor uses with her family, and it’s the one you’ll see in many a celebrity kitchen. Why? You’re about to find out - it deserves every spot.

The Ninja Foodi has captured the hearts of many a family home. The 7.6L capacity can cook ten fish fingers as well as 600g of chips (if you have a special accessory) in 15 minutes. For context, that’s enough to easily feed five people, if not more.

It’s also one of the best air fryers in terms of value. Whilst it might not be the cheapest, when you weigh up the capacity, performance, and build quality, you’d be hard-pressed to find a model that scores higher than this.

Finally, for the health conscious, Ninja uses ceramic to coat their air fryer baskets, so you get a completely non-toxic model. Of course, you still need to cook sensibly in it, but it’s nice to have some reassurance, I think.

Unboxing the Ninja Foodi Dual Zone Air Fryer

Ninja is one of the most eco-conscious brands when it comes to how they package their air fryers. Whilst the box might be big and heavy, it’s all recyclable, including the protective layers around the outside and inside of the drawers. On top of that, Njnja offers a recipe guide to get you started with your cooking, if you haven’t already created a bank of brilliant air fryer recipes that you want to follow.

To get started, all I needed to do was rinse out the drawers - a precaution I take with any new appliance - and plug the air fryer in. The menu lights up with five pre-sets, a manual setting, and the option to match the cooking settings in your drawer, set each individually, or synchronise when they’ll finish, so you can cook two foods, at the same time, and have them ready together.

Ninja boasts that there’s no need to pre-heat and I can testify that this really is speedy. I get perfect results without having to wait for an extra couple of minutes, unlike some other larger air fryers in particular.

What is the Ninja Foodi Dual Zone Air Fryer like to use?

My classic test for every air fryers are chips. This is a great way to test a universally loved food, but they also show up heat transfer really clearly through how they crisp up and change colour. You also often cook them from frozen, so they’re a brilliant way of testing how quickly an air fryer can cook your dinner. Have I made my case for why this is the first test yet?

I could fit a good two portions of chips in the bottom of the Ninja and I have done for the whole time that I’ve used this air fryer. When I was doing my formal tests, I was also working on maximising space, so you can see that I’ve stacked three air fryer baskets (an essential air fryer accessory) on top of each other to create a triple stack of chips. This meant emptying almost an entire bag of chips into my air fryer, but I had some hungry family members floating hopefully nearby, so I knew I wasn’t overcooking the tests.

I set the air fryer drawer to 180°C for 15 minutes and they were the colour that you can see above. I don’t think I would have wanted them in for any longer: they were crispy at the tips and on the outside, but still soft and fluffy on the inside.

Lengthways, the cook was really even and when I only use one layer, I get perfect results. My clever little Lakeland accessory was brilliant for offering more capacity, but the chips were lighter and softer as I got closer to the bottom of the air fryer. This suits my family pretty well: I love a soggy chip, but the rest of my family like theirs crispier. Nonetheless, it’s worth noting for consistency.

Test 2: fish fingers

Another task that I always give my air fryers is cooking frozen food. I actually put the fish fingers in my left-hand air fryer drawer while the chips were in the right. They could cook on the same setting as the chips and for roughly the same amount of time, so when my 15 minute timer beeped, I pulled out the drawer and was met with perfectly crisped up fish fingers. They were neat, even, and steaming in the middle.

You can see that I managed to pack eight into one drawer, which is impressive for any air fryer and even more impressive in a quarter of an hour. I have no notes, which is a rarity.

Test 3: baking

I always like to do a baking test for my air fryers and, as I was working on air fryer accessories, I thought I would give brownies and cakes a bake. I used Lakeland’s silicone brownie moulds to make 8 brownies in 10 minutes. Yes, you read that right: I cooked brownies in ten minutes. That’s dangerous.

They were chewy on the outside and gooey in the middle, which is how I like mine and the proof is very much in the empty cases that were littered in my kitchen before the brownies even had time to cool.

The cake is a slightly different task, because it cooks in a loaf tin. In line with my accessory testing, I used a silicone liner to put in a drawer and fill with vanilla cake batter. At 170°C on the bake setting, this was getting golden in twenty minutes. It doesn’t sound like much, but for a deeper cake, that’s really good. The narrower size of these drawers prevents you from cooking round cakes, but muffins, loaves, and brownies are more than possible.

I got a great bake through the whole of my loaf cake. It had a wonderfully light crumb and plenty of moisture still right through to the middle. At this rate, it’s in danger of replacing my oven.

Test 4: pizza and reheating

One element that I always test is how well the air fryer can cook a pizza and then revive it the next day. For all that a dual drawer design is fantastic, it’s not made for cooking a pizza whole. I had to cut mine into slices to get it cooked in the first place, because even as halves, my standard, supermarket pizza couldn’t squeeze half into the drawer. Once it was in pieces, this cooked perfectly. The crust was still soft and my base didn’t dry out either. I consider myself a bit of a pizza snob and this was still fantastic in my books.

The next day, I put the pizza slices that had been cooked and cooled back in for a refresh with a splash of water. I have a chart of scores that I feed back on and this only dropped one point out of a possible 20 which is exceptional. The crusts were brilliant again, the pizza was wonderfully warm in under ten minutes. The only reason that it lost a point was because I felt the sauce had dried a little more, but that’s me being really picky.

Most of my air fryer tests would stop there, but I know that the Ninja Foodi can do much more than that. As I said, this is the one that all the food team reach for when we’re making our lunches or developing recipes, so we’ve made everything from sesame brittle to poached salmon in here.

I’ve put a couple of pictures above to show you the stir fry, casserole, and stews that I’ve made for dinners in just this last week. Ninja’s recipe book is a great place to start, but you can look at cookbooks like Sam Milner’s to unlock a whole new world of recipes, including roast dinners. Yes, you read that right.

Cleaning the Ninja Foodi Dual Zone Air Fryer

The beauty of the Ninja Foodi is that the drawers and trays can all go in the dishwasher. If you want to preserve the shape and condition of your non-stick, I would recommend washing them by hand and really looking into how to clean an air fryer to keep yours in the best condition possible. At the same time, it’s nice to know that you could just bung this in the dishwasher if you were particularly busy.

For those who aren't fully sure on how to clean an air fryer, we have a page dedicated to special tips and tricks for keeping yours sparkling.

How does the Ninja Foodi Dual Zone Air Fryer compare?

Since the Foodi, there has been lots of copycat designs and some come pretty close to the quality of the Ninja. The strongest competitor is the Cosori TurboTower, which boasts an extra compartment, handy for more elaborate chefs. In terms if timings, the Cosori is about 10% slower, but you’ve got more capacity, so it’s up to you what you want to trade off. I actually didn’t use the third compartment as much in my day to day, but I did like having it for a final flourish to a more elaborate dinner. Its worth noting that both have non-toxic coatings

One of the most common grievances levelled against the Ninja Foodi is that it’s too big on the counter. In response to this feedback, the team launched the Ninja DoubleStack. This takes the same size baskets and rather than expanding in width, they go up. It’s an innovative design that works particularly well in homes that don’t have wall cupboards (make sure you measure if you do). The main change is that you really need to shake or turn your foods half way with the Ninja DoubleStack because if doesn’t cook as evenly as the Foodi. I don’t quite know what changed, but it’s needed and noted by almost any reviewer. Again, this isn’t unusual for air fryers, but it’s a big point of difference when it comes to comparisons.

Should you buy the Ninja Foodi Dual Zone Air Fryer?

This is the air fryer that gets my full seal of approval. Whilst it’s not a one size fits all kitchen category, this is the air fryer that gathers close to universal admiration. It’s very hard to beat.

How we test air fryers

At woman&home, every air fryer that we test goes through a series of basic, discerning, and telling tests. These range from cooking chips, through to frozen fish fingers, grilled vegetables, and reheated pizzas. We get a holistic idea of the scope and skill of an air fryer through these tests, but the Ninja Foodi is a little different.

Our team quite literally uses this daily, so we know it inside and out. If there’s a quirk, trick, hack, fault, or special feature, we know about it. I’ve put everything that we talk about in this review, but if you have specific questions about how this would fit into your kitchen, don’t hesitate to email me. I’m always happy to talk about all things air frying.

You can find out more on our dedicated page for how we test air fryers.