Just make sure to go into owning your Ninja with an open mind, and join online communities if you're looking for recipe inspiration and tips. The Salter Dual Air is much like any other air fryer to use, although there’s some added complexity given that you need to set programmes for each basket. Like many other air fryers, it offers a battery of preset modes for various food types. While these might be useful once you come to learn them, I generally found it easier to use the manual mode to dial up the temperature and time I wanted.

Natalie Corner is the Deputy Commercial Content Editor for Bauer Media, working across brands such as A Modern Kitchen, Modern Gardens, Take A Break Pets, Grazia and more, specialising in lifestyle, home and fitness content. To do this you can make the most of Sync or Match modes, which will either sync the finish times of your food to make sure everything is ready at the same time or use Match to duplicate the cooking settings from your first drawer across to the second. How much does a dual zone air fryer cost? On the whole, if you have a specific reason that means the flexibility to split it into two zones would suit your needs better than other air fryers, then it’ll get the job done. But you’ll just have to accept some of its quirks along the way.

What can you cook in an air fryer?

I’m also the type of person that likes to press buttons without instructions, but the Salter Dual Air Fryer has several auto cooking functions – like different meats, muffins, fish, chips, and vegetables – that will help you select the right temperature and time for your chosen dish. If you’re unsure of the buttons (and the little images they represent) and it’s too much choice, I recommend selecting manual cook and winging it with your own time and temperature. Always go lower and shorter than you need. Any negatives? Upping the game ahead of Christmas dinner, I tested out Brussels sprouts cooked with bacon. This time, too long meant they'd reduced to barely the size of a pea and were very crispy. By Christmas Day, I’d figured out the perfect cooking time of 10 minutes and they were plenty flavourful. Bacon is also a great meat to cook in the air fryer if you like it crispy, but a beefburger dried out and didn’t retain its moisture, so it was almost inedible. Like the Ninja, this air fryer has five other functions, and all of them are perfect for everyday cooking. The bake function is ideal for bread, the reheat function works for leftovers and you can even dehydrate oranges inside with the ability to set the temperature low for a long period of time (up to 12 hours). There were positives with testing this air fryer too. Helen found it cooked much better when in the single zone mode, and cooked up an array of foods with it in good time. Some other foods were less impressive. I couldn’t get frozen hash browns to crisp up quite as much as I wanted, for example. Doubtless the limited top temperature is partly to blame here, but I did get perfect results from the Proscenic T22, which only goes 5℃ hotter. And while corn on the cob was fine, it wasn’t browned evenly and as deliciously caramelised as you might get from a grill. Still, it did a good job when cooking Quorn sausages from frozen.

An air fryer is essentially a small convection oven, circulating hot air around the food to get that crispy outer layer and fluffy or moist inside. It is also more energy-efficient due to its size and power, compared to heating your kitchen oven. The Salter Dual Air essentially combines two air fryers side-by-side. You can use either side independently of the other, allowing you to cook one dish only, or to cook two foods – each can have its own different settings if needed. It’s much the same setup as we’ve seen from the Ninja Foodi Dual Zone, currently our favourite all-round air fryer, and that’s a strong starting place.The premise of the VersaZone is very similar to Ninja's FlexDrawer, with the choice of either one mega compartment or two smaller zones when air frying. After testing, Helen came to the conclusion that this is a top-notch air fryer with a capacity that’ll be ample for most families.

There’s another catch that’s more specific to this fryer. While the Ninja Foodi Dual Zone goes up to 240℃ in its Max Crisp mode, the Dual Air tops out at a rather modest 200℃. That’s plenty for many dishes but, as my tests confirmed, it’s a little gutless for getting the best browning on chips and other items that need a really good crisping or searing. The main reason to buy this air fryer from Russell Hobbs is the flexibility that comes with being able to split the basket into two zones, much like the Ninja FlexDrawer, which we've rated above. Every air fryer in this buying guide has either been tested at home, or at our test facility by one of Ideal Home's reviewers for a number of weeks so that we can adhere to our testing protocol, and reliably tell you what's good and not so good about these products.

How to use an air fryer

It might be too big for single-person households unless you host a lot. And if you have a teeny kitchen, you’ll need to be prepared to find space for it, since it’s quite wide and tall. Furthermore, it’s one of the most expensive Ninja air fryers - a fact that can’t be ignored in your decision about whether to buy.