The Best Air Fryers for Fast and Crispy Cooking

Most people only have space for one extra oven on their counter that's not their stove, so your choice is a function of what you value most—and the size of your kitchen counter.

Basket air fryers such as our top pick can be a remarkably specialized devices, quickly and easily crisping up traditionally fried or sautéed foods like wings and french fries, but with a minimum of oil. A basket fryer's shape is designed to maximize air flow and therefore both exterior crispness and distribution of heat—usually cooking significantly faster than traditional ovens. The air fryer baskets and cooking plates, usually made these days with PFAS- and PFOA-free nonstick surfaces, are also wildly easier to clean than the interior or racks in pretty much any traditional oven.

After the sudden advent of air fryers, makers of more traditional accessory and toaster ovens rushed to add air fryer baskets and “superconvection” fans to box-shaped ovens. Oven air fryers are less specialized, and so they may crisp less well or less quickly than a specialized basket fryer. But they may do a number of other things quite well, including bake a pizza from freshly proofed dough, rotisserie a chicken, toast bread, roast vegetables, broil chicken, and all the other things you might like an oven to do.

In short, they're an oven. They do all the oven things, and also air fry. That said, oven fryers will likely cause you to spend a lot more time cleaning racks, drip pans, and air fryer baskets (shudder) and squinting while reaching in to scrub the sides of the oven walls.

A newer category is a combi air fryer, combining the whip-quick air flow of a basket fryer with a steam function that maintains moisture. As you might guess, this can cook meat like a charm and is still just as easy to clean as any basket air fryer. On the flip side, they can be a bit more expensive.

Just make sure you have room for the air fryer of your dreams on your kitchen counter and that the cooking capacity is sufficient for your needs: A 4-quart fryer should be enough for singletons. A 6-quart fryer is generally good for four portions of whatever you're cooking in it. Larger, often dual-basket fryers add even more capacity for large families, but this size can come at the expense of preheating speed and air flow.

As with any kitchen device, we cooked a range of meat, fish, and vegetables in the air fryers we tested. But we paid special attention to traditionally fried foods that best showcase what makes air fryers distinctive.

For each fryer, we tested, tasted, and compared the air fryer staples of wings, french fries, brussels sprouts, and frozen breaded chicken—assessing the even cooking, moistness and crispness of each.

For wings, we tested whether a fryer could attain a lovely, skin-cracklingly crispy exterior without overcooking the wings, ideally within 18 minutes at 400 degrees. A french fry basket was an excellent test of how evenly the fryer cooked across the basket surface. Veggies can be touchy in an air fryer, and so brussels sprouts were often an excellent test of whether air flow was too intense, drying out the interiors of the sprouts and singeing their exteriors. For frozen nuggets and fingers, we made sure we got crisp breading and no sogginess.

We used a wireless meat thermometer to test the accuracy of each air fryer's thermostat, the consistency of temperature within the cooking chamber, and how fast each air fryer preheated. An accurate thermostat turned out to be a rare and wonderful thing, where air fryers are concerned, but our top picks performed better than the error range of many thermometers.

We judged each air fryer on its versatility of functions and cooking, its ease of cleaning, and the intuitiveness of its control panel. We also looked into our hearts to assess the overall pleasantness of using each air fryer, and whether we'd be happy to have it in our life.

Finally, we checked the decibels on each device using a phone app, to make sure you won't have to live inside an airplane hangar to get a nice basket of fries.

How much oil do I need in my air fryer?

Go easy on the oil. The beauty of an air fryer is that it offers a healthier way to cook with the similar crispy finish you’d get in a deep fryer, but with far less oil. So take advantage and limit the amount of oil you consume by using an oil sprayer that evenly coats your food without drenching it. A shake midway through the cycle also ensures that your food gets evenly coated in oil for better results.

What size air fryer should I get?

A 4-quart air fryer can be enough for up to two people, while a 6-quart-plus air fryer is better for families of four or more.

Remember that an air fryer can work as a convenient alternative to your built-in oven—and potentially save you time and money off energy bills. Using an air fryer means you don’t need to heat up the whole oven for a single portion of fries. But if you find yourself having to use your air fryer multiple times to cook a complete meal, this defeats the purpose.

Unfortunately, air fryers can be bulky, so checking you have enough countertop space above and around your air fryer is a must, both to give the air fryer room to breathe when it’s in heating up and for ensuring you have enough room to prep your meals.

How do you calculate cooking time for something that doesn't have an air fryer recipe?

When you’re converting oven recipes for your air fryer, remember that an air fryer cooks faster and at a higher temperature, so it may reduce standard cooking times dramatically.

If you’re not sure how long to cook in your air fryer, try reducing the temperature by 50 degrees Fahrenheit and cooking for 20 percent less time than you would in a standard oven. And check your food midway through the cycle to ensure things are cooking away evenly, turning or shaking as needed.

WIRED asked nutritionist Jenny Tschiesche, author of Air-Fryer Cookbook, how she keeps her air fryer in good condition. Here are her four simple steps. —Emily Peck

Step one: Turn your air fryer off and allow it to cool down completely.

Step two: Remove all detachable parts, like the basket, the tray, and any space dividers such as those you find in the Instant VersaZone. Many of these parts will be dishwasher safe, but the best way to clean all of them is with warm, soapy water. If food is burnt onto the surface, you may need to soak for up to 30 minutes before scrubbing with a nonabrasive sponge.

Step three: Use a warm, damp cloth to wipe the interior surfaces and remove any food residue. It’s a good idea to wipe the heating element at this stage as well. If you’re dealing with stubborn grease or struggling to get into the crevices behind or in between the heating element, use a soft-bristle brush such as a toothbrush.

Step four: Use another damp cloth to wipe the exterior surface, including the control panel, which may have greasy marks on it.

To help you get the best results from your air fryer, WIRED asked leading European chef Kate Austen for some expert advice. Now based in London, Austen was the world’s youngest female head chef of a two-Michelin-star restaurant (AOC in Copenhagen) and has developed recipes for Gordon Ramsay. —Emily Peck

• Preheat: Some air fryer manuals act like you don't have to. For best results, do. Most air fryers will get up to temp within three or four minutes.
• Don’t cover the cooking plate: In conventional ovens, it's normal to protect a cooking surface with foil. But the whole reason air frying works is the circulation of air, so don’t cover the base of the basket with foil or baking paper or even tight-packed food. You want those crispy bits!
• Don’t overpack the basket: Overfilling the oven will hinder circulation, so keep it under maximum capacity for maximum effect.
• Batch cook: Fried foods that previously wouldn’t taste good the next day will be much better, because there’s little or no oil involved.
• Rest your potatoes: For better baked potatoes, turn the fryer off and leave the potato in the warm basket for 15 minutes. The potato will rest and go soft and sweet.