Instant Pot Vortex Dual 8L Air Fryer review

My family of four (two adults and two children aged eight and four) tried out the Instant Pot Vortex Dual 8L Air Fryer for four weeks. It’s not a brand I was familiar with before this, only Ninja springs to mind, but it’s about £100 cheaper than a similar Ninja product. I’ve never had an air fryer before, but they’re basically ovens, right? I’ve used ovens before.

Since having a second child, lack of time has seen my cooking confidence dwindle, so I was hoping that having an air fryer would give my cooking a kick up the bum.

My first thought about the product is that it’s huge, and I have a small, galley kitchen. After some shifting around, we found space for it. It seemed of good quality, and at a very good price.

As is the case with lots of tech lately, rather than written instructions, a small pamphlet provided a QR code to find instructions online. This is good for the planet, but was bad for me personally, as the web link for this specific product was broken. So, I attempted to use it without reading any instructions, which is, frankly, classic me, and led to the almost immediate discovery that it counts in minutes rather than seconds, as a microwave does. Hot tip.

Testing the Instant Pot Vortex Dual 8L Air Fryer

We (my husband and I, who are cooking for ourselves and our two children) tested the product over a period of four weeks. We all ate the same meals (well, as far as you can with one vegetarian and one feral four-year-old) at the same time. Working full-time, with my husband in the office four days a week, so time is tight. We have a reasonable budget in that we shop at Tesco and don’t have to think too hard about buying whatever food we want – within reason.

I'm not going to lie, we weren’t looking to push any culinary boundaries, but to see what difference it would make to our regular cooking schedule and maybe open us to some new recipes to add to our roster. The first thing we tried was toasting a bagel. Who knew it could toast? Not me, until now. It’s not as good as a fancy toaster, as there’s no function to only toast one side, but it’s better than our currently broken toaster. And the air fryer is certainly better than the grill, as it is HOT out there (at the time of writing), and the air fryer seems to emit little to no heat.

Build

Setting up the air fryer was easy, you pretty much take it out of the box and plug it in for a test run. It did smell a bit…funny…for a few weeks, like the inside of a hot car. Or maybe, thinking about it, like a new oven. I’ve never had a new oven, other than a microwave, before. But the new oven smell is certainly better than the smell of fried food hanging around the house, which using this air fryer eliminates. It’s also very easy to clean, as you can put the parts in the dishwasher, if you’re lucky enough to have one.

Something I was disappointed with was the capacity, despite this being huge. If, for example, I was making beef burgers, veggie burgers, and chips (don’t judge me), there wouldn’t be enough space to accommodate those three things if you need to keep the meat products separate from the vegetarian ones. A downfall is that not all pre-packaged foods have air fryer instructions. Google is very helpful, though, and food labelling is not Instant Pot’s fault.

Things I was pleased with: it cooks really well, frozen chips (came out nice and crispy), salmon fillets (lovely and moist), and corn on the cob was great. The time factor is also huge; things are done a lot faster in the air fryer. And the reduction in cooking smells around the house is so significant, I’m going to mention it again.

Performance

Air Fry: I have no basis for comparison, but I’m happy with the speed of cooking and how the food turned out; it’s just as good as a conventional oven for the latter.

Bake: We made chocolate and blueberry muffins. I was sceptical about how they would turn out, but while we’re not going to be entering Bake Off anytime soon, I was pleased with how they rose and that they stayed moist. Just as good as my conventional oven. The drawers aren’t going to fit a Victoria sponge in there, though!

Grill: This is great for grilling—fast. It would be good if there was the option to toast only one side, though. The capacity is nothing like that of a grill, so if you wanted to do more than four burgers in one drawer and chips in the other, well, you couldn’t.

Roast: My husband roasted some vegetables for a ratatouille and was pleased with how it turned out in a short space of time. Weirdly, these did leave cooking smells lingering about the house, just as they would with a regular oven. So, I guess it’s the smell of frying that the air fryer eliminates.

Dehydrate: I’ll be honest, this was a fail. I’ve never tried to dehydrate anything myself before so have no basis for comparison, but the bananas I did were pretty rotten and took HOURS. I would not recommend, unless you are used to this function.

Reheat: This is a useful feature as it allows you to reheat leftovers, or tepid takeaways, without any microwave ‘sog’ or drying out from a conventional oven. It works great with chips if you’ve ordered a cheeky Maccies and the fries arrive soft.

SyncCook™: This lets you cook the same food in both baskets with the same settings. You set the time and temperature once, and it automatically applies to both baskets. This feature wasn’t hugely useful to me and my family of four, but it could come in handy when my husband cooks Christmas dinner for the gang of us.

SyncFinish™: This, however, is very useful as it allows you to cook different foods in the two baskets at unique times/temperatures, and the air fryer will automatically finish both at the same time. Piping hot burger and chips? Yes, please. We do eat other foods, honestly.

Lock feature: This is sold as a key feature to parents, but my little darlings have not shown any interest in the airfryer so far. It is good, though, if you’re prone to accidentally changing the settings when you’re squeezing past your husband trying to get to the fridge in a tiny galley kitchen, and why is he in the kitchen right now anyway? Just as an example.

Final verdict

This air fryer offers excellent value for money, and anecdotally, air fryers are cheaper to run than ovens. I would recommend this product to people like me who are time-poor and cook simple meals. One friend described air fryers as ‘great for kid-friendly food, ’ and they may be right. Although, as mentioned, I’m not at a place in my life where I’m looking to push the cooking envelope. The highlights of this product for me are the amount of time it reduced cooking by, the lack of heat emitted compared to a normal cooker, and the almost total lack of cooking smells hanging around the house afterwards.