Ninja is the biggest name in air fryers, and for good reason – its compact cookers deliver consistently great results, and there’s a huge variety to choose from. Whether you’re cooking fries for one or preparing a family-sized Christmas dinner, there’s a Ninja air fryer for you. The only problem is deciding which one to buy – and that’s where I come in.
I’m TechRadar’s kitchens expert, testing dozens of small appliances every year, and after hours of cooking and kilos of fries, I’ve put together this definitive list of the three Ninja air fryers I’d recommend to my own friends and family. There’s something here for every household, and here at TechRadar we’ve put each one through a thorough battery of tests to make sure they can air fry, roast, bake, and reheat just as well as Ninja claims.
Best for families
Ninja Double Stack
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If you’re looking around your kitchen and wondering whether you even have room for an air fryer, the Ninja Double Stack is the one for you. It has two drawers, giving you enough space to cook a full family-sized meal – but rather than sitting side-by-side, they’re one on top of the other with a control panel on the side, meaning this air fryer has a considerably smaller footprint than a conventional two-drawer option. It’s a design that’s often copied, but (in my opinion) never bettered.
The Double Stack offers six cooking modes (air fry, max crisp, roast, bake, dehydrate and reheat) and all are winners, During our cooking tests, fries and chicken wings turned out perfectly without any additional oil, and we found there was no perceptible transfer of heat between the two drawers, even when they were set to very different temperatures.
We tested the Sync and Match cooking modes by preparing an assortment of tapas dishes that would usually require careful management to accommodate their different cooking times and temperatures, and the Double Stack handled them with ease, ensuring they were all ready at the same time and cooked to perfection.
The disadvantage of the two-tier design is that there’s no removable divider between the two drawers like there is in some traditional-style air fryers, so you can’t cook one large item like a chicken. Instead, you’re restricted to two smaller portions, but when you’re cooking a full meal with protein and sides, that’s exactly what you need.
Read our full Ninja Double Stack review
Best compact
Ninja Crispi
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The Crispi is an unusual air fryer, designed to be carried around rather than tethered to your kitchen counter. It consists of a set of resealable glass containers that hold your food until it’s ready to cook, and a ‘PowerPod’ lid that contains the heating element and fan that will heat it up. It’s particularly well-suited to reheating and crisping up leftovers at lunchtime, but as we discovered in our tests, it’s also great for cooking small meals from scratch.
It has four cooking modes – air fry, reheat, bake, and max crisp – and although we wouldn’t really recommend it for baking (the Ninja 5-in-1 Grill and Air Fryer below is much better for cakes and bread), the other settings didn’t let us down.
There is a bit of a learning curve to cooking fresh vegetables with the Crispi – they need just the barest spritz of oil and cook surprisingly fast – but once you’ve got the knack you’ll be able to enjoy delicious veg anywhere with an electrical outlet. Diced sweet potatoes turned out particularly well, and we were able to use the max crisp setting to crisp up the leftovers later in the day.
Convenience foods like nuggets, protein waffles and veggie tots all turned out brilliantly without any extra oil at all, as did frozen fries. Panko-crusted tofu was another winner too, with the Crispi proving surprisingly versatile.
If you’re a frequent traveller, have a particularly small kitchen, or just enjoy a hot lunch at work, the Crispi is the Ninja air fryer for you.
Read our full Ninja Crispi review
Best multi-function
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Ninja 5-in-1 Grill and Air Fryer
This super-versatile Ninja air fryer doesn’t just fry – it can also grill, bake, dehydrate, and roast, and does them all extremely well. During our tests we found it particularly good at cooking meat thanks to its temperature probe, which helps ensure your food is properly heated all the way through without drying out. We’ve never had such good steak from an air fryer.
It has a generous 5.7-liter cooking capacity, but is surprisingly compact and didn’t dominate our test kitchen like some other fryers we’ve tested. You get two ceramic-coated plates that slide into the cooking pot, a grill plate, and a crisper plate, which should serve all your dinner-making needs.
It’s operated using a bright digital display paired with large control buttons that are easy to use even when you’re in a rush to get a meal on the table. The screen will also show your food’s internal temperature when you’re using the probe, as well as a countdown of resting time once it’s finished cooking. It’s all very useful and well thought-out.
Not only does it cook meat, fries and vegetables to perfection, this is one of the few air fryers we’ve tested that does an excellent job baking bread and cakes. Our garlic and parsley flatbreads cooked to perfection in just a few minutes, and it could easily replace a conventional oven if you’re only an occasional baker.
It’s relatively pricey for an air fryer, with a list price of £199.99 (roughly $250 / AU$420), but now that it’s been around for a few months you can often find it for a discount. This particular Ninja air fryer is only available in the UK, but if you’re in the US or Australia the Ninja Foodi 6-in-1 Indoor Grill is almost identical.
Read our full Ninja 5-in-1 Grill and Air Fryer review
The best air fryers for all budgets
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The post Looking for a Ninja air fryer? I test them for a living, and these are the 3 I’d buy for my own kitchen first appeared on TechToday.
This post originally appeared on TechToday.