Ninja Foodi 8-in-1 Flip Mini Oven SP101UK

Verdict

The Ninja Foodi 8-in-1 Flip Mini Oven SP101UK is a fantastic air fryer oven that offers excellent and consistent cooking across its selection of handy functions. It’s also well-made with its stainless steel construction, easy to use, and flips away when not in use. If you want a brilliant air fryer oven, this is the one.

Introduction

The Ninja Foodi 8-in-1 Flip Mini Oven SP101UK is one of the brand’s more interesting appliances, operating as a clever multi-function air fryer oven that flips away in a jiffy to give you counter space back.

It is a premium choice at £219.99/$219.99, and clocks in close to some of the best air fryers we’ve tested such as Ninja’s own Combi 12-In-1 Multi-Cooker & Oven SFP700UK and the Cosori 12L Air Fryer Oven, while being dearer than comparable toasters, too. This includes Ninja’s own Foodi 3-in-1 Toaster, Grill & Panini Press which also flips up and out of the way, although it doesn’t offer as many functions.

Design and Features

• Small cavity in spite of its 10-litre capacity
• Easy to program with lots of functions
• Flips away to provide lost counter space.

The SP101UK takes the form of a small countertop air fryer oven-style appliance, offering a narrower cavity than the likes of the Combi for putting food into. It may be a narrower appliance in height, although it is wide and reasonably deep, so good for cooking a fair bit of food in one go.

Its brushed stainless steel finish looks decent, too, and at 8.5kg, the SP101UK is also quite hefty, helping to justify its higher price. Ninja says the SP101UK has a 10-litre capacity, which is excellent for an appliance of its size, especially one that can be flipped away at will for more worktop space when it’s not in use. The company says it’s enough for either a 33cm diameter pizza, 1kg of chips or six slices of bread, allowing for some large-volume cooking.

The SP101UK is also reasonably easy to program with a large, easy-to-read control panel that’s operated by a single dial and buttons underneath. Here, you can select one of the oven’s eight functions, which are well-distributed across a range of modes such as Air Fry, Roast, Bake and Toast. There is even a Bagel setting, as is found on more traditional toasters. The SP101U straddles the line between a clever air fryer oven, and a toaster, too.

Ninja also bundles a range of different implements for cooking food, including a more standard bake tray, a mesh basket for cooking chips, and a wire rack for grilling. Which one of these trays you need depends on which function you use. That information is handily found in the extensive manual that the SP101UK comes with, which also doubles as a useful recipe book.

The SP101UK has a full minutes and seconds readout for convenient checking of the time left that your food needs to cook for. It preheats on some modes apart from Grill, but even on the other functions only requires a little more than a minute until the unit is up to temperature. There is also a light inside the SP101UK’s cooking area so you can check on your food while it cooks.

Performance

• Consistent and excellent performance
• Quick pre-heat time
• Works well as both an air fryer and as a toaster

In my couple of weeks with the SP101UK, I cooked a range of different foods to best gauge its overall performance, ranging from more standard ‘beige’ food such as chips and breaded chicken to fish and chicken. Across the board, the SP101UK impressed with consistent results that matched more conventional top-class air fryers in a similar price bracket.

My first test was cooking fishcakes on the Air Fry setting at 180°C for 16 minutes. They came out evenly cooked and piping hot, while cooking some chicken schnitzel at 180°C only took ten minutes for a fair portion for three people. That’s speedy.

Adding some battered haddock to the mix on Air Fry at 200°C took 14 minutes, with the fish being piping hot inside and the batter nice and crispy.

I also cooked some salmon on the Roast setting at the requisite 180°C where it took 12 minutes, which is one of the quickest times I’ve seen for three portions. In addition, the internal temperature was consistent across all three fillets; even after being on Keep Warm for a further 8 minutes, the salmon remained warm and tasted excellent.

For a quick evening mid-week meal, I also cooked some cheese-on-toast using the SP101UK’s Toast setting. With this, I turned the number of slices up to six, with a mid-range 3/6 darkness level. The bread took 5 minutes to toast, which is reasonably in line with my veteran 4-slot Breville toaster, while the cheese melted well on the Grill setting on Hi for just over a minute.

I also used the Grill setting for browning a small sourdough loaf with some garlic butter added for some quick garlic bread, putting it on Hi for 3 minutes. I then added some cheese to put back on the grill to melt – that only took 1 minute on Hi, and the cheese melted well with a nice bubbly effect.

The Bake setting was also a highlight with some homemade cheese straws at 190°C for 17 minutes with the straws rising well and being browned. They tasted great. It was much the same story with a pesto garlic baguette I baked at 170°C for 12 minutes where it toasted the bread well.

The only small issue was the bagel setting, where it took 8 minutes or so to brown six bagel slices, and it wasn’t necessarily that consistent among the slices. Some weren’t as browned as the others, although they were reasonably well-toasted across the board.

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