Adjust the cooking temperature up to 200C with the easy to use control dial and set the timer up to 30 minutes to suit the needs of your recipe. The results with the Tower Vortx were mixed. Our frozen fries –McCain Gastropub ones –were an absolute triumph, perfectly cooked in 20 minutes with beautifully fluffy interiors and crisp, consistent browning on the outside. Those chips have their own coating, so we air-fried them without any oil. If you do the same, note that the coating does leave a pool of oil at the bottom of the tray, so be careful opening it. In our testing, the FlexDrawer proved to be just as efficient as the Dual Zone and we found the addition of the removable divider incredibly useful. Foods cooked faster and more evenly than in both our oven and some other models of air fryer. It’s an excellent all rounder for large capacity cooking. Amongst the other features are an analogue timer, which runs for 30 minutes. And that's pretty much it. Very simple, if a little too simple. If you want to dehydrate items in the Tower you will have to set your own timer - it is thankfully not essential to set the timer to start the cooking process.

Rapid air circulation creates crispier textures across your mealtime favourites, 30% faster than a conventional oven Most also come with a recipe booklet for culinary inspiration, which is ideal if you’re new to air frying. The Tower Vortx is super small, which makes it ideal for cramped kitchens: it’s just under 30cm high, with a depth of 20cm and a width of 22cm. Rated capacity is 1.5L, but we found the basket was pretty much full with 500g of food. The text on the temperature gauge is very small and hard to read, even in a bright kitchen. (Image credit: Future) The next step was to try and narrow down our search even more. So we’ve already looked the prices of products in the Fryers category. Then we’ve also looked at the prices of products from Tower. So this step combines the two and looks specifically at the price you’d expect to pay for Tower branded products in the Fryers category.

What this means in practice is that to get the same effect, crisping and browning, as another fryer, you'll likely need to use some cooking oil. Adding this via a spray or basting method increases the fat content in your food, something air frying traditionally tends to reduce. There’s no doubt that Tefal’s Genius range is expensive, but you really won’t find a line of air fryers that do the job better. The brand of product you buy can vary in importance, from person to person. Some people will of course be much more particular about the brands they will use. Whilst others aren’t interested in the brand and are more interested in the overall quality or price of the product itself. Thankfully Tower is a brand that many customers have grown to love over the years and is very popular for items in the Fryers category.

The ventilation on the Tower T17023 is pretty good, although this could be due to the size of the machine. It doesn't take as much oil or fat to begin with, and when using without adding fat you only get a small breeze of hot air. Still, I prefer to use all air fryers in a well-ventilated environment, like under or close to the extraction fan above my hobs. SAVE UP TO 50% ON ENERGY: Cooking food 30% faster, Tower Air Fryers use less power than conventional ovens. Save up to 50% on your energy by simply switching to Air Fryer cooking If the brand you buy is important to you, our best advice is to spend some time writing up your own list of ideal brands. That way when you come to the point where you’re comparing product options you can filter to only show the products from brands in your list. The first is brand. Looking at the brand of the product is often a really good indicator for judging product quality. For example you’d expect a much higher quality product from a brand known for providing excellent quality than you would from an unknown or even a budget brand. The Dual Zone’s Max Crisp function is also worth shouting about, as it cooks thinner frozen foods such as chips, onions rings, and nuggets in a fraction of the time it would take a standard convection oven. During testing, one portion of frozen potato lattices came out perfectly crisp and golden in just six minutes, compared to the recommended 15-minute oven cooking time stated on the bag. This air fryer can also bake, roast, dehydrate, and reheat, making it a versatile tabletop multi cooker.The next step after looking at products in the same category, was to look at products from the same brand, Tower. VORTX TECHNOLOGY: Rapid air circulation creates crispier textures across your mealtime favourites, 30% faster than a conventional oven Just before we get into the detail of analysing the price of this product, we want to briefly highlight the importance of setting yourself a budget before you spend too much time shopping around for a suitable product. It’s all too often that we get carried away when shopping and find ourselves buying a fantastic product, but probably actually overdelivers on what we need and therefore costs a lot more than we should have spent. So spend a bit of time looking around at the sort of price you can expect to pay for products in the Fryers category and use that alongside your own financial situation to set yourself a budget.