delicious. reviews: Tower Vortx Dual Basket Air Fryer

Star rating: ★★★☆☆
Best for: Large capacity with small footprint

Price: £119.99 RRP
Volume: 9 litres (two 4.5-litre drawers)

BUY NOW FROM TOWER

BUY NOW FROM AMAZON

What’s good about it?

This air fryer is exceptionally compact and takes up a small amount of worktop space relative to its capacity, making it a good choice for a family with a small kitchen. The manufacturers say that this model will fit enough food for eight people; we think published figures like this tend to be slightly over-optimistic, however, it’s definitely adequate for a family of four.

In this model, the crisper plates are quite flat which means you get a little extra useable height in the drawer. This can be useful if you are baking loaves of bread or roasting larger joints of meat.

Having twelve presets for different food types takes a little bit of the guesswork out of choosing times and temperatures when cooking, but these settings should be regarded as a guide. You’ll need to keep an eye on the food and alter the settings for different dishes.

Tower offers a three-year warranty of which one year is included automatically and a further two years can be claimed if you register the appliance within 28 days of purchase. It’s very easy to get carried away using your new kitchen gadget and forget to do this, but it’s worth doing.

What’s not so good about it?

On this air fryer, the pre-heat function is a separate preset rather than a part of each cooking program. This means that once it has finished its warm-up, the appliance turns off and will begin losing the heat it has built up rather than immediately running into the cooking program. I have tested many other air fryers where the pre-heat option is an optional part of the main program.

On this Tower air fryer, the plus and minus buttons which control the time and temperature options are reversed so that the plus is on the left and the minus is on the right, which is counterintuitive. Eventually, you get used to it, but it’s irritating to start.

The twelve cooking presets on this model are spread across the width of the control panel but are very small. If you have anything less than 20/20 vision you may struggle to work out what the symbols mean, particularly ones like the prawn which represents the seafood setting.

The Vortx has a high-gloss plastic finish and it probably won’t surprise you to hear that it attracts dust and will need frequent wipe-downs to look its best.

For those of you who find noisy air fryers troubling, be aware that this is a very “beepy” model. Instead of a short alert at the end of the cooking cycle, it has quite a long series of beeps to tell you it’s done. Of course there will also be people who find this feature helpful as you are less likely to miss being notified at the end of cooking.

My favourite feature

The ‘smart finish’ option on this model means that you can set up the different drawers to cook for different lengths of time and use ‘smart finish’ so that they are completed at exactly the same time. The ‘match cook’ function is a speedy way to duplicate the time and temperature from one drawer to both, too.

Overall verdict

I love the Vortx’s compact footprint and its three-year warranty but the icons are small and hard to see and I found the reversed plus and minus symbols confusing.

Discover the delicious. team’s tried-and-tested tips for getting the most out of your air fryer.