The one accompanying this product focusses on its grill and air-frying features but there’s a comprehensive cooking guide for everything in the box. It performed nearly as well as our previous top pick (and current upgrade pick), the similarly sized Philips Premium Airfryer HD9741, and it costs about half as much. The Vista is only ovenproof up to 150C and we found the handle a little short, so tossing ingredients in the pan wasn’t the easiest. What’s more, the precise temperature control, variable heat settings and two fan speeds ensure your food is cooked to perfection every time.

When heating, we found the base became hot very quickly and took longer for the sides to catch up, so controlling this was a little difficult and to prevent the foods from burning, we had to keep lowering the heat. The majority of the pans we’ve tested are dishwasher-safe, though, for a pan with a good-quality non-stick, dishwashing will seem excessive. Nicole Papantoniou is the director of the Good Housekeeping Institute Kitchen Appliances and Innovation Lab. It was responsive to changes in temperature and cooked both our American pancakes and omelette brilliantly. And models that provide more functions, like steam cooking or slow cooking, will also cost more than those that are focused on air frying.Our chips were a pale golden colour after 25 mins at 190C (using the 'fries' preset), and had a fluffy middle and crisp, well-sealed exterior. It’s a smart looking machine with flat, touchscreen controls on the hood, tactile accents on the handle and useful cord storage at the back. We checked for even cooking, looking for machines that can cook a whole tray of ingredients consistently, with no overdone or underdone pieces. Additionally, we compared the cooking capacity of each model, and we took note of any egregiously noisy fans or annoying beeps. This air fryer is about two-thirds the size of our other picks, making it ideal for use in small kitchens or dorm rooms.

If there's a drip tray, empty any oil (but do not flush it down the sink; empty it into a sealable can, jar or bag that you can toss when it's full). If your main priority is simply to get a small, inexpensive appliance to crisp food better than a microwave, you might be happy with a small toaster oven without convection. The Cuisinart toaster oven outperforms this air fryer and can do a wider range of cooking tasks with more precision, though it takes longer to do so.

One way is to twist the timer backward to zero, but it’s difficult—there is considerable resistance, and the two dials are so close together that it’s hard to get a good grip.

One of our only irks was the navigation of selecting your function and the ambiguity of some of the function icons. We tested air fryers that consistently overshot the target temperature by as much as 30 degrees, and some that ran cool, never getting within 50 degrees of the target temperature. Anything from the size of the cut to the variety of potato can make a difference here, so it’s always good to gauge things halfway through the time. We find it most effective to manually set the time and temperature on an air fryer, so we appreciate that this air fryer lets you get straight to the point. Using little to no oil, the AF100UK offers perfectly cooked foods up to 75% less fat than traditional frying methods.After removing the rest of the packaging, cut a cross, insert a couple of garlic cloves (unpeeled, whacked with the back of the hand), some fresh thyme or rosemary leaves (a fair bit in fact).