Ninja Foodi Max Dual Zone Air Fryer review (AF400UK)

Chances are, you’ve heard a lot about air fryers. From viral videos revealing recipes for dinners and baked goods that can be prepared and cooked in less time than a typical ITV ad break to their ability to slash your monthly bills …it seems like everyone is talking about the best air fryers at the moment.

If you’re thinking of taking the plunge, is the Ninja Foodi Max air fryer (AF400UK) the right choice for you?

Well, that depends.

This is a superb air fryer – one of the best we’ve ever tested – but it’s definitely not for everyone. As you might expect from a product branded as “Max”, this air fryer is a beast. Ninja has fitted its flagship fryer with two equal-sized drawers, which offer a combined volume of 9.5-litres.

To put that into perspective, you probably only had a 10-litre backpack for all of your textbooks during your school years. In other words: it’s a huge amount of food. In culinary terms, Ninja says that you can expect to cook 1.4kg of chips in each drawer – for a total of 2.8kg between the two drawers, that’s bigger than almost any bag you’ll find in the frozen aisle of your chosen supermarket.

Ninja also claims that a 2kg chicken that be squeezed into each drawer, however, in our experience with the Foodi Max, the width of each drawer will determine whether you can actually fit in an entire chicken, rather than the total weight of the bird.

While one of the major advantages of this design from Ninja is the dual drawers, they’re heated individually and you’re under no obligation to use both when cooking with the Foodi Max air fryer. In fact, Ninja makes it easy to cook with a single drawer, which has more than enough space to quickly crisp some chips to accompany a meal, reheating leftovers, brown some garlic bread or other sides.

Even with a single 4.75-litre drawer, you’ll be able to easily cook up sides for two or three people. Unlike some air fryers, there’s no shelf built into the drawer, so you won’t be able to stack multiple elements in the same drawer. If you want to keep things separated during cooking, you’ll need to dust-off that second drawer.

Ninja – which burst onto the scene with its vaunted Nutribullet smoothie maker in 2013 – has made its Foodi Max air fryer very friendly to newcomers.

In the box with this flagship kitchen gadget, you’ll find a bible with cooking times for the most common dishes, ingredients, and leftovers. Better yet, Ninja had included a number of recipes to showcase what its gadget is truly capable of. Didn’t know that air fryers can be used to bake cakes or make dessert? Not an issue, the Ninja cookbook has a handful of recipes to guide you through this functionality. Unsure how long you’ll need to cook meat inside an air fryer? Again, no panic. Ninja has a comprehensive table that sells you the mode and timings needed for different cuts of meat.

It’s a really useful addition and the sort of thing that sets Ninja apart from the plethora of nondescript air fryer brands stocking the shelves of eBay and Amazon.

The Ninja Foodi Max cooks in the same way as every other air fryer on the market: circulating hot air around the food, ensuring a crisp finish you’d expect from deep-frying (but without anywhere near as much oil). Ninja claims its Foodi Max fryer reduces the amount of oil required by 75%. In our time with the air fryer, we found a number of foods – like frozen chips, cheesy garlic bread, or samosas – didn’t need any oil at all to crisp nicely. However, if you’re making homemade chips or roast potatoes, you’ll want to add a healthy splash into the mix to ensure a good crunch.

Ninja includes a removable crisper plate for each drawer, which lifts the food off the bottom of the tray to ensure hot air circulates under the food for all-around crisping. Even with the plate inserted into the drawer, you’ll need to regularly shake the drawer. With some air fryers, you’ll need to don a pair of oven gloves to do this, but Ninja has designed its drawers so the handle remains cool to the touch throughout the cooking process, even when frying at the highest temperatures. That makes using the Foodi Max much more convenient than some competitors.

The Foodi Max has two ingenious modes that’ll ensure your timings are as precise as that of a Michelin-star chef.

The first, Match, is used when cooking the same food across both drawers. It will duplicate the settings – temperature, timings, and cooking mode – across both drawers to they’ll finish at the same time. This is great when catering for large groups of people, or for larger families. The second option, Sync, is even better. With this option enabled, Ninja will ensure that both drawers finish cooking at the same time – despite using each drawer for different food, with a different cooking mode, amount of time spent cooking, and temperature.

With either of these modes enabled, Ninja will immediately pause the cooking process across both drawers when you remove a single drawer to check on the progress or shake to ensure a good level of crispiness. Both drawers will only resume cooking when the drawer is reinserted, so you can guarantee that you’ll finish cooking at the same time, when the countdown timer on the front of the machine reaches zero.

With Match or Sync enabled, it’s possible to remove a single drawer without interrupting the other.

Ninja offers a total of six cooking modes: Max Crisp, Roast, Bake, Reheat, Dehydrate and Air Fry. Of course, you can customise the temperature for each of these modes, offering an extra layer of flexibility.

If you’re following cooking instructions on a packet, the general rule of thumb is to subtract 20% from the cooking time and reduce the fan oven temperature by 20ºC to 30ºC. However, in our experience with the Ninja Foodi Max, you might need to drop the cooking time by as much as 50%. In our time with this supremely powerful air fryer, rarely did we ever set the timer above 10-minutes. And we never cooked anything longer than 20-minutes.

Coupled with the fact that there’s no need to preheat an air fryer and it’s clear why these devices can reduce your monthly electricity bills by such a drastic amount compared to using an oven. From reheating leftovers, cooking sides, and baking sweet treats, in our time with the Foodi Max on the countertop, it’s no exaggeration to say that we rarely turned on the oven.

Ninja Foodi Max is one of the largest air fryers available in the UK …and as you might expect, that means it has a price tag to match. With an RRP of £229.99, the Ninja Foodi Max – also known as AF400UK – isn’t cheap. As such, unless you’re sure that you’ll be regularly cooking different foods that require unique cooking modes and timings, you might be better suited with a smaller, single-drawer air fryer. Ninja is widely stocked by almost all high street and online retailers, so you should have no issue finding stock of the AF400UK.

The Foodi Max air fryer is an incredible piece of kit. Its dual drawer approach means it’s more flexible than its rivals: enabling you to prepare foods with polar-opposite cooking instructions at the same time with no fuss. And the clever Sync mode means you won’t need Gordon Ramsay barking orders at you to guarantee that everything finishes cooking at exactly the same time, ready to plate up.

If you’re a busy household, or regularly host large groups of friends or family, the 9.5-litre total capacity is more than enough to cook two whole chickens, industrial quantities of chips, and multiple sides for everyone at the table. If you’re a couple or smaller family, you might be able to forgo the oven completely with the Foodi Max air fryer on your countertop. A wide variety of cooking modes means you’ll be able to do everything you can do in an oven – from reheating leftovers and baking desserts, to cooking entire meals with both drawers.

With so many concerns around the cost-of-living crisis, the efficiency of an air fryer – coupled with the lower cooking temperatures, shorter cooking times, and no need to preheat like an oven – means you could see huge savings by switching to one of these gadgets this winter. Of course, there is the initial outlay to buy the gadget to consider…

But despite our effusive praise, the Ninja Foodi Max probably isn’t the best option for most households.

Why? Well, the cavernous dual drawers included with the Foodi Max means it takes up a lot of room on your countertop, so those in smaller apartments will likely have to sacrifice all preparation space to make room for their new air fryer. Ninja itself sells a smaller, dual drawer fryer that might be better suited for couples or those with smaller kitchens.

Second, Nutribullet maker Ninja is a well-loved and respected brand …but it isn’t the most affordable manufacturer at the best of times. Coupled with the fact that’s produced the largest-capacity air fryer currently available in the UK, you’ll really need to hunt out the best air fryer deals to secure the Foodi Max below £200.

In conclusion, if you’re not going to be regularly juggling both drawers, cooking large quantities of food, or want the capacity to bypass your oven completely… there are plenty of other air fryers, including from Ninja, that might be better suited to your needs.

That said, if you want the flexibility afforded by the vast cooking capacity of the monstrous Foodi Max, the superb build quality Ninja is known for, a pretty comprehensive cookbook with recipe ideas and crib sheet with cooking times, plenty of modes to suit all dishes, dishwasher-safe drawers and crisper plates for no-mess clean-up, energy efficiency, and some of the best chips you’ll find outside of your local chippy …the Ninja Foodi Max (AF400UK) is highly recommended.

If you’ve got the space (and the budget) you’re going to adore cooking with the Foodi Max. This Dual Zone air fryer is a beast – in the best way possible.