PHILIPS Airfryer – 13 Cooking Functions, NA220/00

Beautiful contemporary air fryer. I was surprised by how silent this is. You can’t tell that this is running even if you are nearby. Crisps evenly and perfectly. Made juicy drumsticks.

My only concern is with the friction bumpers on the part that sits on top of the basket. The bumpers can come off and I have not seen replacement bumper parts anywhere yet. Really don’t want them to come loose and get lost and not being able to replace them.

We’re new to air frying. Philips is a brand I trust, so I was excited to try it out.

The fryer has eight presets for various common types of food/dishes, including frozen fries, fresh fries, drumsticks, fish, cake (you need a baking accessory), veggies, breakfast (eggs and toast, but you need a “breakfast accessory”). So far, I’ve mainly used the manual settings to adjust time and temperature.

The easiest use is to heat/reheat things. We recently picked up an order of onion rings and sweet potato fries from a restaurant that’s 15 minutes away. In the past, we’d avoid getting anything that’s crispy for takeout because it’s always soggy by the time we get home. This time, though, we used the air fryer for about 4 minutes at 360° and the food was crispy again, just like it was when first served. Yay!

We’ve also used it to heat frozen breakfast sausage, frozen veggie chicken nuggets, and to roast cherry tomatoes. All came out great. The nuggets were especially good and crispy, and in much less time than using our oven, or pan frying them. I also used our microwave to bake a potato, then sliced it in quarters and roasted it in the air fryer for another 5-8 minutes to brown it. Using that combination saved a lot of time, but gave us crispy potato wedges that were as good as frying them from raw.

I also just put in an entire cherry pie (from the local supermarket) to heat and crisp up the crust. It was still in its aluminum pie pan, but that’s not an issue in a air fryer as it would be in a microwave oven. Worked great!

The most adventurous experiment so far was roasting an entire chicken. I used a 3½ pounder, followed some online recipes and cooked it for about 1 hour 15 minutes, until the internal temperature of the breast was 160°. I also scattered some large chunks of carrots around the pan to see if they’d be properly roasted (they were great!).

I made an error in following the recipe… I started with the breast side up when the instructions said to start with it down. I flipped the chicken after 15 minutes, and then continued with the breast down for another 30, then finished with it up for the final time. The skin was crispy and delicious, but by having the breast facing up towards the hot coil for that long, I feel I may have dried out the meat a bit. Still delicious, and next time I’ll know better.

Some of the additional features I like:
• there’s an oven light and large window so you can watch the progress of your food’s cooking
• when you pull out the drawer to test doneness, or to toss the food, the fryer automatically goes into Pause mode, and resumes when you slide the drawer back in
• the frying plate and drawer are both dishwasher safe (though so far we’ve only washed the frying plate in the dishwasher)

There are so many uses for this air fryer that the biggest challenge is probably breaking old habits, and considering first whether the item we’re about to cook would work well in the fryer. I’m looking forward to getting to know it’s capabilities.

It’s our 2nd air fryer! The window is really
good, we can see what’s going on in there! Highly recommend!!

We previously had a large bowl-shaped air fryer that usually produced lackluster results. We’re a little late to the trend, but finally decided to give an actual air fryer a try and immediately noticed a difference.

I’ll start with my complaints. First, even as just a family of two, this air fryer feels a little small. In order to keep things in a single layer and avoid overcrowding the basket, it feels like I can only cook one or two servings of a single item at a time – for instance, 8 mozzarella sticks or 9 chicken nuggets. This means that if I’m cooking a whole meal in the air fryer, I have to choose what I want to cook first and risk being a little cooled off by the time it’s all done. I also had a hard time finding accessories that would fit into a fryer of this size. The basket is 8 inches wide at the top and a little smaller at the bottom, and a lot of the accessories and paper liners I see are made for fryer baskets that are 8 inches along the smallest part at the bottom.

Second, I find it a little annoying to have to reset the temperature even when I use the fryer in quick succession. The instructions for chicken nuggets say to flip them halfway through, so I set the timer for 8 minutes, took them out to flip them, and though it only took me a minute or so, I had to set the temperature and time again when I put them back in. I wish that if the machine was not in use for a short amount of time (eg: 5 minutes or less) it would remember the previous settings or something. It’s also a little annoying to have the time immediately pop up at 20 minutes. I’d prefer to set it up from 0 like every other timer in my kitchen. Last, the insert is a little tight to put into the basket and even though it has rubber/silicone feet, I’m afraid to scuff the inside of the basket. It’s a great piece, but I would have probably made it just a centimeter or so smaller so that it fits into the basket a little more easily.

For the positives, I absolutely love that the cooking drawer and insert are dishwasher safe. In general, the entire unit is much more water safe than I anticipated – I didn’t expected to be able to actually wash the inside where the basket sits, for example. This is a really nice feature of the unit, in my opinion. The drawer slides in and out smoothly, though it is best to hold on to the main body to prevent it from sliding around since it takes a bit of force when right at the base. Thankfully, the top of the unit does not get too hot, even after running at top temperature for about 25 minutes total between a few batches of things.

It took me a minute to understand how to use the presets, but I would say it’s pretty simple once you figure it out – when you press the power button the presents show along the inner ring. I had to press and hold the preset button for a second until it blinked a few times to select it. It’s pretty easy to set the temperature and time by holding the buttons. I really like that the frying basket has a window where you can turn on a light and look in on the food. The window is nice and wide, providing a good view despite the handle being right in the middle.

Overall, I’m very happy to add this to our kitchen. The mozzarella sticks we made were a very large improvement over doing them in the oven or our old dome-shaped fryer. Everything so far has come out with a much better crisp and browning along the edges than usual. It’s just a question of portion sizes and how to best leverage the small space as we continue to experiment.

I have an Tfal XL air fryer, which I use several times a week to make dinner. I love how quickly air fryers cook food and also crisp up food that should be crispy. However, there are several things I don’t like about the Tfal XL air fryer as I got to know it over time: 1. there is no window to view the food; 2. the touch control is quite finicky and you can’t easily pick a temperature (default is C, not F) and time; 3. it is loud; 4. it’s large basket only means you can pile things high, but the actual base of the basket is not that big to spread things out.

When I saw this Philips Air Fryer, I thought the capacity was smaller at 6.6 qts, but it’s actually a larger capacity than the Tfal XL (which is 5.3 qts). Yet the machine itself is not bigger; the height is lower, and the rest of the dimensions is about the same.

In testing it out, I made spring rolls and chicken fingers tonight. Both turned out great! I found the controls way easier to operate and I love having the viewing window. It is super quiet too, much quieter than the T fal. And although the basket is shorter, it is actually larger so I can spread out food. With the T fal basket, the basket style parchment paper is too big but with the Philips, it drops in perfectly.

I’m so happy with this one I will switch from my Tfal to this machine, especially since it doesn’t take up more counter space.

The noise volume from the blowing air is much smaller compared to the previous Ninja one I had. Also, it heats food more evenly from bottom and from the top (probably due to the shape design of food basket). I don’t need to regularly stir the food anymore.