VonShef 9L Dual Air Fryer Review
An affordable dual zone air fryer.
Verdict
The VonShef 9L Dual Air Fryer largely delivers on its idea of making dual-zone cooking more affordable. It’s a smart-looking air fryer with lots of handy cooking presets and is capable of a decent performance for the price with relatively even cooking. You’ll just have to watch out for the sharp crisper plates.
Pros
- Smart design
- Lots of cooking presets
- Easy to set the time and temperature
Cons
- Somewhat inconsistent cooking
- Crisper plates are quite sharp
Key Features
- Large capacity:The 9 litre capacity on offer is enough for larger families who need to cook lots of food at once.
- Two cooking zones:It also comes with two separate baskets to allow you to cook two different items.
Introduction
The fun of a dual-zone air fryer is being able to cook two things at once, and the VonShef 9L Dual Air Fryer provides that for a pretty reasonable price, all things considered.
Much like its smaller 5L single-zone counterpart, this air fryer offers two cooking zones and a variety of presets for a good price at £104.99, which is cheaper than other single-zone fryers.
Design and features
- Glossy, black finish
- Large number of food-based presets
- Beware of sharp crisper plates
In keeping with many other air fryers in this price bracket, the VonShef 9L Dual Air Fryer sports an all-black finish, and it looks good. The glossy finish looks nice, although will probably only stay that way for only a few moments, as it may be prone to inadvertent finger marks and grease.
The dual baskets feel substantial and offer a total of nine litres of cooking capacity, which is significantly more than any single-zone air fryer and the smaller Ninja AF300UK, although lags behind Ninja’s bigger (and more expensive) AF400UK and AF500UK.
The fact there’s a handle on each basket may not seem the most obvious thing to point out, but it’s always nice to see convenient measures like them. Speaking of convenience, the VonShef 9L Dual Air Fryer also comes with a pair of silicon baskets for cooking in, which are a handy addition for the price.
At first glance, the wide control panel that fits across the front may look a little daunting, with many different symbols. Once you read the manual, however, and realise that the symbols simply relate to different preset times, then the VonShef 9L Dual Air Fryer becomes a lot easier to operate.
There are a good amount of options, relating to everything from meat to chips, and even cake if you so choose. In total there are 12 options, including the pre-heat setting. There is also a Sync Finish setting for making sure your food finishes at the same time, even when cooking different foods in each drawer, and a Dual Cook function if you want both zones to cook for the same time and temperature.
Much like with its smaller brother, hitting one of these presets will display a time and temperature on the small readout present. The control panel allows you to choose the temperature and time after you’ve selected a preset, but you can’t seem to set them yourself, which is a shame. The digital display will only show the time in minutes that food has left to cook, as opposed to minutes and seconds. Something more exact would have been nice, but you can always set a timer on another device, such as an Amazon Echo.
The baskets themselves, along with the crisper plates, can also be put in the dishwasher, or you can hand wash them as I did. Cleaning them with hot, soapy water is easy enough and doesn’t take too long.
The only thing to watch out for is that the two crisper plates, like the one on VonShef’s smaller air fryer, are especially thin, and offer no real rubberised coating on the handle, with sharp edges. Even holding them for a short period may lead to you getting a sharp prick on the tips of your fingers, as I did when washing them up.
Performance
- Somewhat uneven cooking
- Presets work well most of the time
- Shallow crisper plates can cause some issues
To best gauge how well the VonShef 9L Dual Air Fryer cooks, I cooked a variety of different food across its two baskets.
First up, I used the dedicated chips setting to cook some triple-cooked beef-dripping oven chips. They took the required 18 minutes at 200°C and were well-cooked on the outside, and fluffy inside. Despite being shaken every five minutes or so though, some were more crisp than others.
However, things were less successful when cooking some homemade chips. They were cut into similar-sized shapes to the oven chips, washed, patted down to remove the starch, and tossed in a small amount of olive oil. Using the dedicated chips preset wasn’t enough, and it took half an hour for them to cook. Cutting another set into smaller cubes also suffered the same fate, and they weren’t that evenly cooked. It was the same story for cooking carrots on the vegetable preset. That called for 160°C for ten minutes, and they took closer to 20 minutes.
I also cooked some sausages on the dedicated meat setting (200°C for 12 minutes), which took a little longer, and they were well-cooked. The usual Ninja AF400UK I use is a little more efficient in cooking the same sausages, but I’ve got little to complain about with this VonShef option so far, apart from one thing.
As the crisper plates sit rather low down in the baskets, it means that fat and grease don’t drain away as effectively as with other fryers, so your food may cook in the fat that drains out, depending on what you’re cooking, of course.
Moving over to trying some breaded prawns, these were cooked for 12 minutes at 200°C from frozen in the silicon basket that VonShef provides.
The basket is convenient for cutting down on the mess, but meant that the coating came out soggy. Moving them out of the silicon basket and onto the crisper plate for a further four minutes did crisp them up, though.
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Should you buy it?
You want the benefit of two independent cooking zones
The VonShef 9L Dual Air Fryer brings the fun of two large cooking zones to a more affordable air fryer, and it executes it pretty well.
You want more consistent cooking
Compared to slightly more expensive competitors, the VonShef 9L Dual Air Fryer doesn’t cook food as evenly or as consistently, so for the absolute best performance, you may want to look elsewhere.
Final Thoughts
The VonShef 9L Dual Air Fryer largely delivers on its idea of making dual zone cooking more affordable. It’s a smart-looking air fryer with lots of handy cooking presets and delivers decent performance for the price with relatively even cooking. You’ll just have to watch out for the sharp crisper plates, which are a literal pain.
Other options at this price point are available, such as the Chefree AFW20 which trades its cooking capacity for handy features such as more cooking modes and the fun of windows. It also offers slightly more consistent cooking.
However, if you just want an affordable dual-zone air fryer that’s largely decent for the price, then this VonShef choice is one to consider. For more options, it’s worth checking out our ranking of the best air fryers we’ve tested.
How we test
We test every air fryer we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry-standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as our main air fryer for the review period
We cook real food in each air fryer, making chips, frying sausages and cooking frozen hash browns. This lets us compare quality between each air fryer that we test.
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FAQs
The VonShef 9L Dual Air Fryer features a 9-litre capacity, split evenly across two 4.5 litre baskets.
It has a total of 12 presets for different types of food, and for pre-heating.
Full specs
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
