Instant Vortex Slim 6-quart Air Fryer review: small but mighty

The marinade infuses the chicken thighs with a perfect balance of flavors, resulting in a juicy and aromatic main course. This juicy Orange Chicken recipe is one of my famous air fryer recipes – at home. Using simple ingredients, this recipe is a family favorite. This air fryer eggplant recipe is one of the best eggplant recipes I have ever made. This is a completely plant-based meal for all my vegan/vegetarian friends.

It’s large enough to fit an entire chicken, so it’s an easy way to cook an entire dinner. Thanks to the nonstick surface, this air fryer is ideal for baking, too. Thanks to the super-slick nonstick coating on the moosoo air fryer’s basket, it’s very easy to clean. Food easily wipes away (though the basket is also dishwasher-safe).

In the Ninja air fryers the chicken was done after nine minutes, a far cry from the minutes the packaging suggested. In the Instant air fryer it took a little more time because the temperature was lower, but after 12 minutes it still came out very evenly cooked and with visible sizzling on the breaded coating. In 8 minutes, the Instant Vortex Plus produced tender broccoli with lightly browned florets that tasted great. However, the air fryer struggled to cook the broccoli evenly, performing in the middle of the pack during testing. It could have been more even, but my family still gobbled the batch up. We did find it browned frozen French fries and chicken nuggets well, but the limited capacity of the inner pot made it difficult to air fry large batches of food.

We cooked 18oz which fitted very well into the six-quart cooking basket and set the air fryer to 360°F for 18 minutes. The one slight exception was when we were roasting vegetables. We noted that the steam leaving out of the back of the air fryer formed a vortex-shape, spiraling into the air before disappearing. The air fryer has an insert at the back of the air fryer that claims to remove odors as it cooks. This can be removed and inserted easily for cleaning, and it uses removable filters which need to be replaced.

instant vortex

The Vortex Plus XL is very easy to wipe down as there are no large gaps that hold onto stubborn crumbs. There are, however, two baskets, which double your clean-up. The Instant Vortex Slim still has a few bells and whistles that might not be necessary for all users – the touchscreen, customizable settings and dishwasher-safe components, for example. These all inflate the price, so you might be better off buying a more basic model. The rest of the Instant Vortex lineup is great, but you just might not care about fancy features such as OdorErase, ClearCook or the progress bar. There’s still more than enough in here to make the appliance feel high-tech and well considered.

For reasonable cooking times and best results, you’ll only want to cook about 1 pound of food at a time or as much as can fit on the 10-inch square bottom in a single layer. During cooking you get a prompt on the screen to turn the food, which is helpful as it’s always a good idea to rearrange food during air frying moosoo air fryer to get an even result. There are no preset cooking programs on this air fryer; instead you need to set the temperature and time manually as well as the overall setting, such as air fry, roast or reheat. There’s also little guidance in terms of cooking charts supplied — you will need to go online to find these.

This Air Fryer Frozen Dumplings with the best Garlic Chili Oil recipe will blow your socks off. We did notice during testing that the control panel started to smuge up with our fingertips, and this was a little tricky to buff away. It was particularly noticeable in the glare of the test kitchen lights, but over time we could see this being an issue for those who want to keep their kitchen spotless and smudge-free. Another good feature is the ClearCook drawer, which becomes transparent when you illuminate the cooking area using a button on the control panel. At $99, the Instant Vortex is cheaper than many other models out there with the same capacity and functions. If you use it once a week, its essentially a net cost of less than $2 a week for the whole year.

Millie Fender is Head of Reviews on the Homes and Gardens Ecommerce team. She specializes in cooking appliances, such as the best kettles, and also reviews outdoor grills and pizza ovens. Millie loves to bake, so she will take any excuse to instant pot duo nova review stand mixers and other baking essentials. When she’s not putting products through their paces in our dedicated testing kitchen, Millie’s reviews are conducted at home, meaning she uses these products in her own day-to-day life.