Ninja - DoubleStack XL 10 QT, 6-in-1, 2-Basket Air Fryer, Space Saving Design - Gray

With an all new vertical design, the Ninja Doublestack XL fryer allows you to cook up to 4 foods at once in a form factor that is much more narrow than comparable sized fryers. It has 10QT capacity, using individual 5QT baskets, that can be configured with removable grill spacers that allow you to divide foods between top and bottom or remove the grill spacer and use the entire 5QT basket for one food, like a traditional fryer. The design is nice, but it’s mostly plastic on the outside. The vertical basket placement is great and they slide in and out with ease. The control settings have a very nice digital display off the right hand side of the unit. You have a large and bright LCD display for time and temp and readout, along with a nice jog dial selector control. The vent fans on this one are also out the right side, not the back. For our kitchen, this works out great due to where we placed the fryer on our counter, but just be aware if that might cause an issue. It fits nicely under standard cabinets and is not too heavy if you need to move it around. One thing we do notice that I’m guessing is due to the type of plastic design of the unit, it gets very hot to touch pretty much all around the outside, and it also seems louder than other comparable fryers we’ve tried, not much insulation for temp or sound is found here. Also, while cleaning the fryer before our first use, the solder of one of the grill spacer handles broke, not a good look before we even cook something… The Doublestack does a lot. Air Fryer is just one of 6 settings that thing claims to do, including bake, broil, roast reheat and dehydrate. We’ve not tried them all, and Air Fry is probably where you’ll use it the most, but it does have the stated capability to much more. I would also assume, based on our usage so far, that a similar trial and error learning curve will be found across all the different settings. In terms of Air Frying, it’s just fine. Easy and right to the point. We had some trial and error with time and temp based on different foods, since the vertical design splits your food into 5QT portions, and if you use the grill spacers, that adds a new wrinkle related to how long you cook the food. The one benefit that we were able to see right away, is the feature of the grill spacers that when used, that cooks the food to an extra crispy style. So it’s great for those foods that need that extra crisp, that might be hard to get in other fryers. However using both baskets and both grill spacers for multiple types of food, means you will more than likely play around with the time and temp for a bit, until you’re comfortable that the food you’re cooking comes out the way you like. I noticed this more on the Bake setting myself. Using Bake settings similar to a standard oven didn’t work for any of the food we tried, so lots of adjustments were needed. But once you get the hang of adjusting the time and temp relative to what you’re cooking, it works great. One of the great features of the Doublestack is the Match Cook setting. Basically set different foods with different time and temps in either basket, and the Ninja will make sure that both are done at the same time, sort of a set it and forget it feature. No more hurrying to get one food out and wait on the other. Another great feature we love is that when the cooking is done, it actively goes into a cool down mode, where the vent fans kick into overdrive a little bit and work to cool down the fryer and not just let all that exess heat stay and build up. Cleaning is easy, as both baskets and the grill spacers are dishwasher safe, and they all have non stick coatings that allow even hand washing to be a snap, food doesn’t stick and wipes right off. Overall, the main feature here is the space saving design, along with the various cooking options this allows. it makes the case to be left out on the counter as an all around go to for quick, easy cooking with fast clean up. It has some great features built in, but nothing revolutionary here, just a great solid product from the Ninja brand.

We’ve gone through more air fryers in our house than I’d care to admit. Either the unit dies on us after less than a year, or it just doesn’t work out. One of my wife’s biggest gripes about an air fryer big enough to meal prep for a family of 4 is that it takes up way too much space on our counter. This is the first air fryer that my wife doesn’t have serious complaints about. Design: The baskets are thin but deep; and side by side with our other unit, each individual basket holds almost as much. However, with the removable rack you can actually utilize the entire basket, compared to a typical air fryer basket that you have to leave space between the food to allow circulation. Cooking: comparing to our other air fryer, the Ninja does seem to take a few minutes longer to cook the same volume of food. However! The fans are significantly quieter than our other air fryer units - and, most importantly, the food turns out much crisper. Cleaning: this is probably one of the biggest pros for this unit. Everything is well thought out for real world use. You can pull the racks and dividers out to allow for easy cleaning. Overall: high capacity, space saving design that cooks focal crispier than our other air fryers. Highly recommend for families, or just meal prepping.