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Read Time:   |  1st February 2023

11-litre digital air fryer oven with rotisserie, reversible grill plate, 3 shelves, drip tray, kebab skewers, and oven mitts

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Tower Air Fryers are getting a great reputation as being good all-rounders, so we wanted to put one to the test to see what we thought for ourselves.

The model we chose was the 11-litre XpressPro Combo 10-in-1, which offers a variety of different pre-set cooking functions, an oven-style set-up with enough space to fit three racks – so in theory the ability to cook three different foods at once – a rotisserie accessory and dehydrator capabilities.

But is it worth the money, and does it deserve its place on our kitchen worktop? Read on to find out about our experience of using the air fryer…

Buy today at Amazon’s best price (£125)

It’s extremely easy to set up the Tower Air Fryer Oven as it comes with a thorough instruction manual that takes you through everything in a step-by-step process.

Once removing all the packaging, the instructions talk you through how to make sure you have enough space (10cm) around the air fryer to allow the hot steam to release uninterrupted.

Then you have to switch it on for 15 minutes at 200°C to allow any manufacturer coating residues to burn off.

This did fill the kitchen with a slight aroma of chemicals for that time, but this disappears quickly and doesn’t come back after the initial run.

The digital screen at the top of the air fryer is easy to navigate, with the menu bar allowing you to rotate through the pre-programmed settings for things like chips, or you can set the temperature and time yourself to give you more control.

Again, there is a handy chart in the instruction manual which guides you through different types of food, what they should be cooked on (for example racks, the grill plate or skewers), at what temperature, and for how long.

If you’ve never used an air fryer before, it really does make it incredibly easy and user-friendly.

The air fryer also comes with lots of different accessories to get you started, including:

The Tower Air Fryer Oven also comes with a great recipe book showing just how versatile it can be, so you are reassured from the outset that your new bit of kit will do more than make good chips in a slightly healthier manner.

The recipe book isn’t vegan (although it does have a veggie and vegan chapter), so some recipes will need a little adapting, and the meat and fish chapters can just be ignored, but there are some nice recipes for tropical muesli, onion bhajis, aubergine and chickpea curry, and blackberry and apple crumble.

Anyone curious about experimenting with a raw vegan diet might also be interested in the dehydration section, which includes recipes for dehydrated bananas and curried parsnip crisps.

There’s also a QR code you can scan to get a digital recipe book too.

Homemade chips crisp up nicely on the racks of the Tower Air Fryer Oven. Image © Vegan Food & Living

When you think of air fryers, you think of a healthier way to cook chips, right?

We now know that they can do so much more than that, but we thought it was a good place to start.

We followed the instructions given in the recipe book to cut the potatoes into chips first, then par-boiled them in a pan of water for around 6 minutes.

After this we washed them off to get rid of any remaining starch, thoroughly dried them with kitchen towel to remove as much moisture as possible, then tossed them in 1 tbsp oil.

After that it was a case of spreading them out on the tray and then using the pre-programmed setting to cook them for 20 minutes.

The way this oven works is that you can fit three trays into it at a time, but the top tray will cook the most and the bottom tray the least.

So halfway through the cooking time I swapped all the trays around so they would cook more evenly.

After 20 minutes the outside of the chips were quite crispy, but I wanted them a little more, so cooked them for another 5 minutes.

The result was lovely fluffy insides and perfectly crispy exteriors.

The only thing I would do differently next time is to maybe use a spray oil to give a little better, more even coverage.

When cooking Richmond Meat-Free Sausages in the air fryer, the grill plate comes into its own. Image © Vegan Food & Living

To see how the air fryer coped with a meat alternative, we decided to try cooking some Richmond Meat-Free Sausages.

Following the guide in the instructions, we first warmed up the grill plate for 3 minutes in the air fryer.

Then, using a layering system of drip tray on the bottom, wire rack, and finally grill plate on the top, we fitted eight sausages onto the plate and put them in to cook for 15 minutes at 180°C.

After the 15 minutes they were perfectly cooked, and more importantly, really evenly cooked. Despite not turning them around as you might in a pan or in the oven, they were evenly cooked all over, with a nice crisp to the skin.

Plus the drip tray caught any liquid that came out during cooking, so the air fryer itself stayed clean. Perfect.

The topping of a crumble crisps up perfectly in an air fryer oven. Photo © Vegan Food & Living

One thing that amazed me about air fryers is that they can be used to cook cakes and desserts, as well air fry savoury dishes.

So I decided to try out a crumble to see if it would give that crisp topping that I seek on a crumble.

I made the dish according to my usual recipe and used the same dish that I’d use in the oven. The great thing about this oven is that you don’t need to buy any special equipment as anything that you’d usually put in the oven can be used here, size permitting obviously.

I set the air fryer to 180°C for 20 minutes and the result was just what I was looking for. A deep golden top featuring the perfect level of crisp, with a soft, fruity filling.

Buy today at Amazon’s best price (£125)

When it comes to air fryers, I’ve quickly discovered that it pays to do your research and decide what you want first.

If you’re looking for an air fryer oven rather than a lid or drawer type, you won’t go far wrong with the Tower XpressPro Combo 10-in-1 Air Fryer Oven.

Its 11-litre capacity means you can easily cook for a family of four, and as long as they can be cooked at the same temperature, you can also cook different things on each of the three air flow racks.

You do need to remember to rotate the racks during cooking as the top one does cook a lot quicker, but I didn’t find this too much of a drawback in reality.

Having such a large capacity also means that it’s a fairly big bit of kit, so you want to make sure you’ve got room for it in your kitchen. Once it’s in there it does look sleek and stylish, so you’ll be proud to have it on display.

The biggest advantage I found is that it works pretty much like an oven. Although I didn’t find that it cooked things much quicker than a conventional oven as the box suggests, and some air fryers do, it will still save you money and obviously has the added health benefit of not needing the oil. It also achieves a better crisp than my oven does at least.

It completely shuts off when the time is up too, so no chance of anything overcooking if you forget to set a timer (not that I’ve ever done that before, honest).

It’s definitely a keeper in my eyes.

We thoroughly test each air fryer in order to write an informed, useful review that you can trust.

To do this, we follow the same process for every air fryer that we review.

First we unpack the box, look at what you get with the air fryer, and then follow the instructions that come with each specific air fryer to set it up.

The important thing for any air fryer is how it cooks food though, so we test each one at least three times. Firstly to cook homemade chips, then to cook a mock meat, and thirdly to either cook a baked item, or to test the frying ability, depending on the capabilities.

We judge the air fryers on how well they cook the food, how crisp the finish is, how long food takes to cook, how easy the machine is to use, how easy is it to clean, and how many extra capabilities/functions it has.

Each air fryer is then given a score out of 5, and rated on what purpose it is best suited to.

Want to put another air fryer to the test? Check out our review of the Karaca Air Pro 2-in-1 Air Fryer

Launch editor of Vegan Food & Living – the UK's best-selling vegan magazine and PPA Consumer Magazine of the Year – and creator of Britain's biggest annual vegan attitudes and behaviour survey, The Big Vegan Survey, Sally is always on the search for talented writers and exciting new vegan products

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