Absolutely worth the counter space IMO, and we don’t have a lot of it in our city condo. It is the only appliance other than our espresso machine and drip coffee maker that has been awarded coveted counter space. This is a really big one–in a regular air fryer, you can’t see your food cooking so it’s really hard to monitor. Air frying definitely has a learning curve, especially with the Cusinart, I’m told, because it tends to run pretty hot.
The LED interface is a combination of buttons and knobs and it has a limited three-year warranty. The instruction book has recipes and helpful cuisinart air fryer oven charts for successful air frying and dehydrating. However, few of these multifunction countertop ovens are the best at air frying.
The air fryer basket needs a good soaking to clean it, but the baking dish has a nonstick coating. The oven also comes with an excellent cookbook to get you started on air frying. When the timer went off, the fries were still a bit hard inside and the tops were way more brown than the bottoms, so I turned them and put them back in for an extra five minutes. The finished fries were quite well browned and though they were cooked through, they didn’t have the fluffy centers and crispy outsides that I‘ve come to expect from fries cooked in an air fryer, I was disappointed.
It offers many settings, including “Proof” so you can proof your bread dough, a setting we’re seeing more and more in air fryer toaster ovens that offer low temps. When we test the air frying function on appliances and air fryers, we cook a pound of chicken wings and a pound of french fries in each machine to see how quickly and evenly each crisps up. We also assess several ease-of-use factors like whether the appliance has an intuitive control panel and is easy to clean.
I followed the recipe in the instruction manual for classic roast chicken. I was skeptical about the 45 minute cook time, as my chicken packaging advised almost two hours in a normal oven for a 4lb chicken. Nevertheless, I stuck to the recipe and cooked it on convection bake without preheating for 25 minutes at 400oF, turning it down to 350oF for the final 20 minutes. The bagel was nicely browned in around four minutes, which is slightly longer than the 2-3 minutes that it might usually take in one of the best toasters. But it’s still quicker than a broiler, since it doesn’t need time to preheat. Another plus is that there’s enough room for six slices of bread at once and you can toast up really thick sliced bread that wouldn’t fit in a standard toaster.