Welcome to a weekly feature on my blog – Ben’s Zone. Written by husband… Ben. A foodie, coffee obsessed, ex-smoking, ex-drinking and Ridgeback loving Dad. Who is also seriously into his fitness. You can find him on the blog (mostly) on Sundays. Enjoy!
*AD – Item was gifted for the purpose of this review, but all opinions are my own. This article also contains affiliate links.
Innoteck Kitchen Pro 6 in 1 Air Fryer Review
Air fryers are super things. For years we’ve been told that frying stuff is the work of the devil and in enjoying it we’re condemning ourselves to an early grave until air fryers came along. Now we can have chips as much as we like, as long as we do them in an air fryer. The person that came up with air fryers must have been slapping themselves on the back as well. They are basically tabletop sized convection ovens with powerful fans. The hot air heats a tiny bit of oil, the fan blows it around you get food that tastes deep fried but without destroying your health.
All in all, I have loved air fryers for a while and have been using a Tefal Actifry for a couple of years. The Innoteck Kitchen Pro, which we have been sent to review, takes all that to the next level.
In addition to traditional air frying options, it offers a bunch of features from standard ovens (roasting, baking, reheating) you can also slow cook and dehydrate.
The unit itself is pretty large at 12 litres but it’s tall rather than wide so it is not overbearing on the countertop. It takes up less space on the countertop than my old Actifry. It’s stylish and modern looking with a touch screen interface and large, simple, one-button control at the top.
The inside allows for 3 layers of racking and a basket-type rotating device. The basket rotates so that food can be cooked without having to be turned, this is a handy touch not found on all air fryers.
The inside is very easy to clean. This may not sound that significant but a big gripe about the Actifry that I had before is that there are some bits that are just impossible to clean, so it looks ugly on the countertop and is consistently grotty. All the trays come out of the Innoteck and it’s easy to wipe down inside. This is a real win. The problem with not being able to clean them properly is that grease gets everywhere and eventually kills fans and heating units.
The heating itself is pretty beefy at 1800watts. This means it gets up to temperature near enough instantly and things cook in surprisingly small amounts of time. Which is great when you lead busy lives as we do.
In our house, a popular after swimming dinner is sausage and chips (once a week, normally we feed them on organic peahen and heritage vegetables (ha!), but after swimming, we make an exception) and in 20 minutes the sausage and chips were whipped up quite nicely. The kids (and me, as I had to have a taste) were nicely impressed. This was done in the basket.
The next day I tried bacon for bacon sandwiches. A tip here is just to put a splash of water in the (removable and dishwasher safe) drip tray to prevent smoking. I did exactly that and 10 minutes later I had an excellent crispy bacon sandwich.
It’s so easy to use for cooking bacon that when I found myself doing some for a salad later in the week, I resolved to use the Innoteck and, simply put, it’s the best result, in the shortest time with the least mess to clean up.
I did think I better look into some of the less traditional features and so I decided to slice up some apple and run that through a dehydrating programme. This is, essentially, a low-temperature cook over a long period of time and it yielded some really superb apple crisps. These made a perfect lunch box snack for the kids to take to school, I may or may not have snaffled a few as well.
We did have a go at using the included spit to roast a chicken on a rotating spit. The problem is it needs quite a small chicken and we actually struggled to find one small enough in the supermarket (the maximum weight is 4lbs or 1.8kg). The one we purchased did not spin properly, and so we just roasted it in the airfryer in the end (without it rotating). The result was still pretty nice though.
The airfryer comes with lots of accessories. 3 cooking racks, a spit roast, a spinning basket, a retrieval tool and a drip tray. All of which can go in the dishwasher for easy cleaning, which as I mentioned above is important. Certainly, it is much better to be able to have multiple shelves in the oven (3 in this case) as this means you can cook loads more stuff. In terms of practical use, this is a superior design.
As you’d expect from any oven, both temperature and time can be set and there are a number of useful preset programmes for commonly eaten foods, all of these can be modified in terms of time or temperature, should you wish.
Overall then, I really like the Innoteck. It beats my old Actifry in terms of performance (time to cook a given piece of food), functionality and also style. Whereas the Actifry was very limited in what it could do, the Innoteck is a much more versatile piece of equipment and, as a result, I can see us using it a lot more.
Price-wise, you can’t go wrong either. It’s a family-size unit at 12 litres and it’s available online for just over £100. To give some context, other air fryers offer about half the capacity at that price point and an Actifry starts at around 50% more.
For a very reasonable price Innoteck have created a flexible and useful air fryer and I’m pretty stoked to be using it. For me, the mark of a great piece of equipment is that I find excuses to use it and I am definitely doing that with the Kitchen Pro. We haven’t got around to baking in it yet, but watch this space.
Buy the Innoteck Kitchen AirFryer on Amazon
