Our old paper meal plans go into a folder when they come off the fridge, and on Sunday I went through the last year of them and counted. Since the first week of last May we've planned 256 dinners, and the air fryer is written next to 91 of them. That doesn't count lunches, snacks, Wyatt's burrito habit or the Super Bowl wings. For a $139 appliance we bought partly on a hunch, that's a lot of dinners.
We bought the Ninja Foodi DualZone, the 8-quart model with two 4-quart baskets, on May 2 last year, on sale from $199. Our old 4-quart air fryer went to my mom in Denton, where it still cooks two salmon fillets at a time and she still texts me pictures of them. Here's what a year with the bigger one actually looks like.
What it cooks every week
- Eli's plain food next to everybody else's. Plain chicken strips in one basket, seasoned potatoes or buffalo strips in the other, both finishing at the same moment. This is still the main reason it's on our counter. Nothing touches, nobody waits, and I don't cook two dinners in two places.
- Bone-in chicken thighs. Eight thighs, four per basket, at 380 for about 25 minutes. Crisp skin without heating the house, which made it the backbone of last summer.
- Potatoes in every shape. Fries, wedges and tater tots, always in two rounds. I learned not to crowd the basket the hard way last June, when an overloaded batch of fries steamed into something pale and sad.
- Vegetables. Broccoli and green beans tossed with oil and salt, 390 for about 10 minutes. It's the only way Wyatt eats broccoli without a negotiation.
- Reheating. Pizza slices, breakfast burritos, leftover fried chicken. Wyatt finishes his freezer burritos at 375 for 4 minutes after the microwave, and I've stopped pretending it isn't better.
The two big jobs it did this year: six pounds of wings for the Super Bowl in three rounds, and this Lent's Friday fish tacos, with the frozen breaded pollock done in two quick rounds across both baskets. A year ago those fillets took three batches in the old fryer and the first batch was cold by the time the last one came out. That one dinner is basically why we bought this thing.
What never worked
- Bacon. It set off the smoke alarm the first weekend we owned it. I tried twice more with water in the drawer underneath, and it was still smoky. Bacon went back to the cast iron, or a sheet pan in the oven when it isn't summer.
- Wet batter. One Lent Friday I tried homemade battered fish, and the batter dripped through the crisper plate and glued itself to the bottom of the basket. Wet batter needs hot oil. Frozen breaded fillets are fine.
- Baking. Muffins came out dark on top and gummy in the middle, and cookies only fit six at a time. The oven still wins here, even in summer, if I bake early in the morning.
- Big cuts and big crowds. A whole chicken doesn't fit, and neither does a pork shoulder. Anything past the five of us turns into a relay again.
Wear and tear
I've hand-washed the baskets all year to save the nonstick coating, and they've held up well, with one exception. The left basket has an inch-long scratch near the bottom corner. I would love to blame Matt for it. It was me, with metal tongs, during the third round of Super Bowl wings. Silicone-tipped tongs live next to the air fryer now.
Once a month I unplug it, let it cool, and wipe the grease off the inside ceiling above each basket with a damp cloth, which nobody tells you to do and which keeps it from smelling like last week's wings. One of the little rubber bumpers on a crisper plate went missing in February. I suspect Biscuit. The basket rattles a little now, and it works exactly the same.
The money
When I plugged it into a meter last June, both baskets for 25 minutes used about 10 cents of electricity at our old rate. On the 24-month plan we switched to in October, that works out to about 9 cents, though I plan to put the meter back on everything this summer to check rather than just do the division.
The purchase price is the real cost. Counting the 91 dinners plus my rough tally of lunches, reheats and snack runs, it has been used something like 240 times, so the $139 comes to about 58 cents a use so far, and that number gets smaller every week. The return I can't put in a cell is a summer kitchen that stays close to 76 degrees, and a seven-year-old who eats dinner at the same time as the rest of us.
Would I buy it again? At a sale price, yes. It's wide, it's one more nonstick thing that won't last like my skillet, and it hasn't replaced the oven so much as given the oven the summer off. Tonight it's on the plan next to chicken strips and fries, which makes 92.
