This Instant Vortex Plus Dual Drawer Air Fryer offers two individual cooking zones for greater flexibility and expandability of your culinary experience if you want to air fry, bake, roast, grill, dehydrate or reheat. Retailing at £229, it’s positioned at the higher end of the current air fryers that are for sale, but is it worth that for added functionality? Buy on Amazon

Design

The black body comes in two trims and we have the black on black variant, but another version accented with a silver trim is also available. It is a smart kitchen gadget that could be allowed a permanent residence on a worktop for not being too colossal (38.4 x 40.3 x 31cm) or unsightly. Well, it is a tad larger than the typical air fryer due to it featuring two independent cooking zones, but smaller than the typical microwave, and the Instant basically doubles the capacity of a standard air fryer, including the one we were previously using.

The good thing is that the all black version we have is certainly a colour that disguises oil and general kitchen grime rather well, unlike our regular white coloured air fryer. The only downside to the design is that the body features a lot of glossy surfaces; the entire top and curved fronts of the cooking baskets are glossy. These are going to, and do, get greasy. Cleaning them down, however, isn’t all that bad as general purpose kitchen spray and a cloth do the job quickly.

With the Vortex Plus Dual Drawer air fryer it’s all about those baskets which are easy to remove and reinsert. When you peer inside them they reveal a clever design detail that is a slight twist on previous air fryers we have used where the basket drawer is removable from an outer container. Instead of the contents you put into the basket directly touching the floor of the basket, a blissfully easy to remove mesh elevation platform sits neatly in each basket, replacing the need for an outer container. This helps also with grease/oil separation and collection clean up, which is made even easier thanks to a good non-stick coating that is certainly better than many we’ve used before.

Controls

Physical controls are very 2010 and the slab of a touch sensitive panel has replaced them here. You can adjust the temperature, time and mode of each zone independently or sync them together. The control layout is blatant enough in design to obviate the need to reference the manual to navigate your way through from the very first use. After this it is plain sailing and the sensitivity of the touch display is pleasingly responsive; no need to annoyingly re-enter your commands for the lack of registration and the dial allows for quick adjustment.

Cooking

Chips: Our standard method for chip making always includes 4-5 minutes of par-boiling the cut potato chips and then hopping them into the air fryer basket drawers with 2 teaspoons of sunflower oil (it's a good idea to get the Instant air fryer going through its pre-heat stage while doing this). Whilst the combined basket sizes don’t appear to be overly larger than our current single basket air fryer, looks can be deceiving. The two baskets almost double our current previous air fryer capacity to produce a total capacity of 7.6L, allowing, if you need, to cook 8 portions of chips. For four people this is where the separate cooking zones come into their own. On one side we can air fry 400g of chips and on the other vegan fish, both at different temperatures and times.

Being able to peer into the individually illuminated baskets is very useful, as it gives a better impression of cooking times and when to toss the contents (even though this Instant version will notify you to do so midway). Instant recommend higher temperatures than we have previously gone, or have been able to go to, in the past with air fryers. Setting the cooking temperature at 195°C, but ignore their timings as it takes 2x as long. 25-30 minutes is how long we need for the perfect chip: fluffy on the inside and crispy on the outside, with a good consistency throughout the basket. However, we would suggest tossing an extra 2-3 times throughout with fuller basket drawer if you want to be certain of a good rotation, as the middle section of a fuller basket will get left behind if not adequately shuffled.

Baking - Sticky Toffee Pudding: As a convection method of cooking, it’s no surprise that cakes cook rather well inside the Instant Vortex Plus Dual Drawer air fryer. Nevertheless, we wanted to challenge it to a trickier bake, so we made a sticky toffee pudding. The important thing here is that the top of the cake doesn’t catch (as it's the closest part to the internal heating elements) and the stickiness quality is seen in the finished product. So an even bake is very important and is a good test to see how the airflow system performs. Pleasingly it indeed baked evenly, with the iconic stickiness throughout. So the onboard thermostat appears to regulate the temperature effectively for reliable baking results. 

Frozen Foods: The tighter environment inside the Instant air fryer makes cooking frozen food a bit quicker than using an oven in our testing, and can definitely have an advantage of convenience for smaller portions, etc. The final result doesn’t differ from oven cooked. However, adding a minuscule amount of oil to oven and air fried contents will show a touch more crispness with items like onion rings and potato croquettes cooked in the air fryer.

Verdict

It’s a very good air fryer in its own right and is impressive for the fact that it’s a device that adds only a few centimetres to its dimensions to accommodate an extra 2 litres of capacity over a typical single basket air fryer, thus giving a total of 7.6 litres. There will be cases where people are using two separate air fryers, and this neatly homogenises them into one, with added functions such as dehydration included too. The touch interface together with the turn dial is the best control input we’ve used on any air fryer to date. End cooking results from chips to cakes has been consistently excellent and importantly the Instant Vortex Plus Dual Drawer Air Fryer is a well made kitchen gadget and worktop friendly. Buy on Amazon