Tower vortx digital air fryer review: Can it roast a chicken in 40 minutes or is this claim clucking mad?

Buy now £119.99, Towerwarehouses.co.uk

• Capacity: 11l
• Dimensions: 33.9 x 38.2 x 32.4cm
• Power: 2000W
• Maximum temperature: 200C
• Weight: 7.56kg
• Rating: 7/10

Pros

• Can cook multiple foods at one time
• Five different functions
• Large enough to cook a chicken in
• Auro-programmed settings
• Quick to set up
• Clear glass door for monitoring cooking

Cons

• Bulky on countertop
• Initially smells strongly of plastic
• Not as easy to clean as some alternatives
• Short cable

How do you set up the vortx 2000W 11l 5-in-1 digital air fryer oven?

Setup is really simple with this one. Alongside the air fryer itself, you’ll find an instruction manual, three cooking racks, a roasting spit and handle plus a drip tray for the bottom. We found the initial smell of strong plastic quite off putting but after following the instructions to wash each of the removable parts and to wipe the interiors, this dissipated slightly.

Once you have your drip tray slotted into the bottom you can arrange the mesh cooking trays above however you like, depending on how many different things you’re going to cook. For example, you could remove all the racks – leaving just the drip tray – so as to be able to use the rotisserie function instead.

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We found the short cable to be a little restrictive on this one. Often electricals come with short leads now for safety reasons, but this was so small that we actually found it tricky to find a socket in our kitchen that it would be compatible with.

How do you use the vortx 2000W 11l 5-in-1 digital air fryer oven?

Boasting five functions, we thought we’d try each one out. You can manually programme the machine using the digital keypad, but there are automated settings for the most popular dishes which we could do with just the touch of a button.

Here’s what the machine promises it can do, alongside what we thought of each function.

Air Frying

The main event – air frying – is the reason most people buy this machine we would imagine, and in our humble opinion, the primary purpose of an air fryer is to make chips. So that’s what we did.

Rather than being able to simply cut and throw your spuds in, this model requires you to do some weighing, peeling and parboiling, which is fine but not exactly the speediest dinner solution in the whole world (at this point we were sort of thinking we should have just tried it with frozen chips, which it can cook in 20 minutes according to the manual).

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There’s an auto function for chips that you can easily select from the digital controls to get you going, and with a fairly intuitive interface, we were off to a quick start. Because this mini oven pushes air across the top of the interior, chips on the top racks – if you’re using multiples, like we were – will cook faster and more evenly than those on the bottom. This meant we had to do a little reshuffling of the trays every now and then to get both trays equally golden. The glass door helps here though, as you can easily keep an eye on things.

For two large potatoes, you use one tablespoon of oil, which when compared to deep frying is a pretty good result. We swapped sunflower oil for olive oil and loved the additional flavour it brought.

Overall we thought they were good chips with a crunchy texture and soft insides (which no doubt the parboiling helped with). Was it easier than just cooking them in the oven? Potentially no, but using miles less oil and having a pile of fries in record time, it isn’t to be sniffed at.

Rotisserie

This, we think, is where the Tower vortx air fryer comes into its own. What looks like a complicated industrial process in most supermarkets or at street food fairs can now be achieved in your own kitchen. It’s safe to say we were impressed.

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The catch is that it has to be a relatively small chicken – but even so, it would still be a big enough bird to feed a family of four. To start, you remove the racks, then skewer your chicken. The metal rotisserie bar is removable and comes in two parts. Thread the first half through the middle of your chicken and use the spikes at one end to secure it in place and repeat with the other half on the opposite end. Your whole chicken should be clamped onto the bar ready for cooking.

In 45 minutes we had ourselves a golden, succulent chicken all blistered in cooking juices and moist from being continuously moved. The results were honestly delicious and gave this air fryer a real point of difference.

For us though, which we suppose defeats the point of having a “health fryer”, we wanted to use the cooking juices and fat that had collected in the drip tray to make wonderful roasties. It seems a waste to throw away all that flavour.

Other features

The other three functions were dehydrating, roasting and baking. While each of these are nice extras to have, they wouldn’t be standout enough features for us to use them very regularly.

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The dehydrator can only make a couple of handfuls of fruit at a time, so seems a lot of work for not much reward. While the roasting results were good, leading to golden, crispy potatoes with not much oil.

When it came to the baking function, we felt it performed much like a conventional oven – although we did note an even rise on our cakes presumably as a result of the more consistent airflow.

How do you clean the vortx 2000W 11l 5-in-1 digital air fryer oven?

The vortx air fryer oven has been set up for fairly easy cleaning. The door is actually fully detachable so that you can access any dirt, grease or buildup that might accumulate in the hinge, and all the trays and racks are removable.

After cooking a whole chicken we found that the entirety of the interior needed a pretty thorough clean – a warm soapy cloth and a bit of elbow grease did the job. But after just a few chips a quick wipe job satisfied our hygiene standards.

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On the wire racks, we found bits did stick here and there, which was a bit fiddly come tidy up time, but no more so than a traditional roasting tin. Overall this isn’t just a “dump it in the dishwasher” job, but the non-stick interiors make it fairly easy all the same.

How much is the vortx 2000W 11l 5-in-1 digital air fryer oven?

The vortx 2000W 11l 5-in-1 digital air fryer oven retails normally for £119 on the brand’s own website, although we’ve seen it at times on Amazon for as little as £99. We’ve also spotted offers running on Tower’s website in the past, so it’s worth doing a bit of shopping around if you’re after one for your kitchen. As always, sale times like Black Friday and Boxing Day are perfect moments to pick up electricals if you’re happy to exercise a little patience.

The verdict: Vortx 2000W 11l 5-in-1 digital air fryer oven

There’s no mistaking the fact that the vortx 2000W 11l 5-in-1 digital air fryer is a chunky piece of kit. It’s more the size of a mini oven than anything else, but despite its bulky bones, it does come with a real USP that other air fryers can’t come close to: the hallowed rotisserie chicken. We just couldn’t see past the fact that you could roast a bird in under an hour and honestly thought it was a stroke of genius. Hello, midweek roasts, our new friend.

The chips we made were pleasingly golden with a good texture, and the use of just a tablespoon of oil is a pretty good way to get your fried food fix without overwhelming your arteries. Potentially a little fiddly given the need to parboil beforehand, but if you’re buying it for the dual use of both chicken and chips, we’d say this is a solid investment.

We also liked that you could use multiple levels to cook a few different things – like fish fingers on one level and chips on the other – something which few other models offer and is great for larger households and families. Additional features like dehydrating and baking we thought were a bit by-the-by.

Overall, we were impressed with how straightforward this was to use and how good the results were for the whole chicken (one day we’ll stop going on about that, but until then consider us homemade rotisserie evangelists).