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The toasting was fine, but you’ll need to turn toast for best results. To make fries, I cut up 1 pound of potatoes into steak cut size pieces and coated them in 1tsp of oil. Nowhere in the manual does it advise soaking the fries before air frying – which is a common recommendation with other air fryers. So I spread the fries in a single layer on the basket and set it to air fry at 400oF for 15 minutes. The manual says that stirring is only necessary for larger amounts and since the fries were in a single layer, I left them for the full time.
I also tried air frying frozen breaded fish fillets which is usually my preferred way of cooking these. The crumb was hard and overly crisped, it tasted like it had been under a broiler and the fish inside was drier than usual. Overall the air fryer function just didn’t produce the same results as the best air fryers I’ve tried. Testers cuisinart air fryer oven noted that while it can be tougher to clean, its design and function made for incredible results. The chicken they cooked in the appliance had crispy skin and juicy meat. While there are no distinct presets on the appliance, testers added that it’s a bonus if you like a bit of extra control throughout the cooking process.
While this knocks only a few minutes off the cooking time we’d have required in a regular oven, every little helps! The pizza came out perfectly and evenly cooked, which can’t be said for the slightly soggy, irregular results of some domestic ovens. While they took a little longer to cook at 15 minutes, the results were perfectly crispy, golden fluffy fries. For our frozen thick-cut fries, we set the temperature of the mini oven to 440oF / 230oC per Cuisinart’s instructions. Since this was our first test, we decided to allow the oven to preheat for 5 minutes before putting in our fries for 12 minutes, shaking them mid-way through cooking. In letting some of the heat out to shake our fries, we probably just about saved our food from oblivion; by the end of the 12 minutes, the fries were a little too brown, and a little dry.
There’s also a crumb tray that pulls out and can be cleaned, but we never really need to clean it since there’s another tray below the basket. What makes this Ninja “smart” is a thermometer that plugs into the unit for automatically cooking to precise temperatures. Your beef tenderloin will always come out medium rare and a chicken will never be undercooked. Along with the oven and trays, the Cuisinart Airfryer Toaster Oven also comes with an instruction manual that includes a number of cooking tips, guidelines and best practices for your new appliance.