Cuisinart AirTwin XXL Dual-Zone Air Fryer AFD100

Introduction

For flexibililty, it’s hard to beat a dual-zone air fryer. If you want to cook a lot of food, then the Cuisinart AirTwin XXL Dual-Zone Air Fryer AFD100 is an absolutely huge beast of a device, with dual 5.2 litre baskets, for a total of 10.4 litres of cooking space.

This model uses PFAS-free coating, which makes it safer to cook with. A useful range of cooking modes is handy, but the interface is occasionally clunky and I quite often had to add a bit of extra time to the cooking.

Design and Features

• Dual 5.2-litre drawers
• Air fry, roast, bake, grill and dehydrate cooking modes
• Can synchronise drawers to finish cooking at the same time

With its dual 5.2-litre drawers, the Cuisinart AirTwin XXL Dual-Zone Air Fryer AFD100 has a huge capacity that matches that of the Ninja Foodi FlexDrawer Air Fryer 10.4L AF500UK. However, Ninja’s air fryer can be used as one huge drawer if you want to cook especially big portions, whereas the AFD100 has two individual drawers.

Not that this is a problem. As with the Ninja Double Stack XL 9.5L Air Fryer SL400UK, the AFD100 is still flexible, and you can cook in one drawer, double-up ingredients on two drawers, or cook different items in each.

Both of the drawers are pulled out from the front via their handles. I found the right-hand-drawer, in particular, to be a bit sticky, and it often moved the air fryer forward as I pulled it.

A firm shove is needed to make them lock back into position; unless a drawer is firmly in place, the screen will show ‘out’.

Crisper plates go in the bottom of each drawer. They need a firm push to lock them into place, and so that they sit flat, rather than at an angle.

Cooking options are available via the front screen. There’s a button to select the left drawer and one to select the right, and then the cooking options are available.

The row of buttons at the top are cooking options, and include keep warm, which runs at the end, and shake reminder, where you’ll hear a beep when it’s time to shake the food.

There are then two cooking modes for both drawers. Match Settings sets both drawers to the same mode, temperature and cooking time, and is for cooking double portions. Sync cooking is when you want to cook different things in each drawer, but have the air fryer finish cooking both at the same time.

For Sync to work, you have to set both drawers to a cooking mode first, otherwise this option doesn’t do anything.

Cooking modes are below, and include air fry, roast, grill, bake, dehydrate and max crisp. However, max crisp is not a cooking mode on its own, and can’t be selected. Instead, you have to choose one of the other cooking modes (bar dehydrate), and then use Max Crisp to select the air fryer’s maximum temperature, which is just 210°C. That’s a way behind Ninja’s 240°C for its Max Crisp mode.

Simple controls let me set the cooking time and temperature to use, before hitting the Play button. This can also be used to stop cooking, if you want to finish early.

It’s good to see that the cooking time and cooking temperatures can be adjusted during cooking, to take into account how food cooks.

For multi-drawer cooking, removing either drawer pauses cooking on both. That’s particularly handy when using the sync mode, as shaking the ingredients in one drawer doesn’t put the cooking times out of sync.

I do like the Shake reminder, as it’s a handy way to remember to turn the food, although you can disable this if you don’t want it.

At the end of cooking, the drawers and crisper plates can be hand washed, or you can put them in the dishwasher if you prefer.

Performance

• Food needs a bit more time than estimated
• Crisp results
• Good grill settings

I started by cooking some chips and some fish fingers. As there’s no pre-heat mode on this air fryer, I only reduced the oven cooking instructions a little, but I found that this wasn’t right, and my chips were initially very anemic and undercooked.

Putting everything back in for a few more minutes was worth it. The chips had a crispy exterior to them, and a softness inside, while being evenly cooked.

My fish fingers were good, too. They had a nice crunch to the outside and maintained their shape, without the sogginess that normally accompanies oven cooking.

I then cooked hash browns using the Max Crisp mode. I’d normally cook for around 12 minutes, but at 210°C I had to increase cooking times. The result was good, but not the best that I’ve tested: the outside wasn’t quite as crisp as I’d like, and the inside was not quite as fluffy.

Air fryers with higher cooking temperatures, such as the Ninja Double Stack XL 9.5L Air Fryer SL400UK, do cook better.

I then used the grill mode with a salmon fillet. Again, I needed to increase the cooking time slightly to account for the lack of a pre-heat. Overall, the results were good, with my salmon having a nice colour to it and texture, but it didn’t hold its shape as well as when I cooked salmon with the precision temperature sensor in the Ninja 5-in-1 Grill & Air Fryer EG351UK.

Should you buy it?