Ninja Air Fryer Max Pro 6.2L AF180UK

Verdict

The Ninja Air Fryer Max Pro 6.2L AF180UK is an excellent mid-sized air fryer with sleek looks and speedy, consistent cooking. It’s also slightly smaller than the competition despite its large basket size. If you want a zippy air fryer that nails the basics, this is one to go for.

Introduction

The Ninja Air Fryer Max Pro 6.2L AF180UK sounds more like the latest iPhone in terms of its naming convention, as opposed to the big brand’s latest air fryer.

Nonetheless, the £149.99/$169.99 list price makes it one of the priciest single-zone air fryers, and there is some stiff competition here including the five-star Cosori 6L Turbo Blaze that wowed me before with its rapid cooking, sleek looks and excellent performance. It’s perhaps here where Ninja has set its sights on the AF180UK, for a large capacity, speedy single zone air fryer.

Design and Features

• Sleek looks
• Larger basket for a smaller footprint air fryer
• Super easy to program

The AF180UK looks smart with an all-black matted plastic frame, with some flair on the control panel with its glossy finish. This wouldn’t look out of place in a modern kitchen, both as an appliance and as a bit of a display piece. There is also some extra flair with the silver accents around the top and on the handle, which is pleasant to see.

For its larger 6.2L basket capacity, the 305mm height, 280mm width and 360mm depth means the AF180UK offers quite a small footprint. It doesn’t take up too much counter space in my kitchen, and is actually slightly smaller than Cosori’s 6L Turbo Blaze while offering a larger basket.

The control panel is classic Ninja – simple to operate with actual physical buttons. As opposed to the brands that stick with a touch panel, the AF180UK offers buttons for its different functions, as well as for setting the time and temperature. There is a decent selection of functions here, too, with options for Air Fry, Roast, Max Crisp, Bake, Reheat and Dehydrate. With this in mind, the Turbo Blaze offers more functions, such as Grill and Proof, as well as its Turbo modes.

Combined with this, it also has a full minutes and seconds readout when the appliance is in use, which saves guessing about when your food is going to be finished. Mounted on the front fascia, the AF180UK’s control panel is easy to read and unaffected by any light coming in from a window.

The basket feels reasonably weighty, with a solid crisper plate inside that has a fair amount of holes to help with airflow. It isn’t as sturdy and thick as the other crisper plates found in earlier models from Ninja such as my trusty AF400UK, but still offers no flex.

Once you’re done with the basket and crisper plate, they can both be put in the dishwasher. I avoided this in my testing and instead chose to handwash them. Doing so is easy, and they were clean, dry and put back in a matter of minutes.

Ninja also bundles its usual recipe book and instruction manual with the AF180UK to get you up and running, which is handy. There isn’t any app support, although Ninja has a website with additional recipes if you need inspiration.

Performance

• Some excellent results
• Consistent results

In my couple of weeks with the AF180UK, I cooked a range of food to best gauge its performance, including chicken, fish, chips and steak. Whatever I cooked though, the AF180UK was excellent with consistently solid results that didn’t take long.

My first test was to cook some breaded chicken on the Air Fry function at 200°C. This took 12 minutes, and the coating was quite crispy with the chicken piping hot. The haddock fishcakes I cooked on Air Fry took 10 minutes at 200°C and were even crispier in less time – that’s quite the feat.

Moving to some marinated salmon, this cooked on Roast for 15 minutes at 180°C. This made for some of the best salmon I’ve cooked, being packed full of flavour and moist, in little time, while also having a good colour. With regards to some triple-cooked oven chips, these took 12 minutes at 200°C on Air Fry and were crispy and evenly done.

Steak is sometimes quite fiddly to get right in an air fryer, but the AF180UK cooked two larger pieces of sirloin rather well. It cooked in 14 minutes on Air Fry at 190°C, being flipped halfway through. It came out with an internal temperature of 60°C and on the pinker side, as I’d prefer.

For a final couple of tests, I used the Bake function to toast some bagels with garlic butter spread on them and melt some cheese. It took just 3 minutes at 170°C for the bagels to be toasted and the cheese well-melted. A selection of chicken sausages also cooked in just 12 minutes on Air Fry at 200°C with rather even results.

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