Cosori are one of the leading manufacturers of air fryers in Europe & the US. They offered me an air fryer from their range to test out and I chose the 5.5L model. Check out the video below to see what I thought of it, the feedback isn’t all good…
Transcript
Hello and welcome to my channel. Now imagine you’re new to air fryers, you buy this one, take it home and plug it in and the first thing you see is this…
You might do what I did and turn it straight off again and think I’ll tackle that later when I have more head space. The 5.5L Cosori air fryer has a LOT of buttons, but don’t panic…. In this video I’ll show you how it works and tell you about its features and its pros and cons
Now first up this air fryer was gifted to me by Cosori so I could make this video, but you’ll get my honest opinion of it, the manufacturer has had no input into this, beyond sticking this air fryer in the post
So we do already have an air fryer, there’s a link to the review for that in the description below, but for the last couple of weeks we’ve left that well alone and swapped entirely to this Cosori
This Cosori is a single drawer air fryer and it’s pretty compact which saves on worktop space. One of the nice things about it is it’s available in several colours not just black AND there’s a smart model which works with an app.
The manufacturers have made some big bold promises about this model, they say that it cooks 50% faster than a conventional oven and as a result you will save you money on your electricity bill.
Another one of its features is unlike a lot of similar shaped air fryers, it has a square rather than round basket, so that gives it a little bit of extra capacity relative to the size of the machine and the 5.5 litres in its model name is how much the basket could hold if you filled it up completely.
So let’s talk about this overwhelming display of buttons! Don’t be put off by them, all of these buttons are presets not settings, they are intended to help you save time not to get in the way of you doing your cooking. So for instance if you want to cook steak, you press the steak button and it will suggest a temperature of 205c and a duration of 6 minutes but if you have a recipe that says differently or you want to cook for longer or shorter time, you have the choice to alter what the preset gives you or forget the preset entirely and start from scratch by setting the time and the temperature which you can do using the controls in the middle of the machine.
The controls also give you the option to preheat, keep warm and to pause cooking and if you pull the drawer out at any point in the cooking the timer and cooking will pause automatically
The intake vents for this air fryer are on the top of the machine, you can see there is a gap that runs all the way round the edge of the top and it’s important not to block that, so you have to resist the temptation to put things on to the top of the air fryer when you are doing your cooking.
The hot air that comes out of the air fryer does so at the back and this air fryer has a piece of plastic that sticks out to stop you from putting it too close to the wall and blocking that output
The heating element is pretty accessible so it is easy to get in a do a deep clean once in a while
The drawer that you do the cooking in has two parts, there’s an internal basket which clicks in to an outer drawer and I’ve got to be honest, it feels like this is quite a weak part of the design. All the way through the instruction booklet if you read it there are reminders not to press the release button of the basket when you are cooking and you can see they’ve actually added a sliding button guard to stop people pressing it by accident. It feels like they were quite a long way into building this thing when someone realised the design was a problem and so they slapped this plastic guard on to fix it. I don’t like it, it wobbles about, it gets in the way and I’m pretty convinced it will be the first part to break all be it if it does it won’t be terminal.
So I’m guessing you are itching to know what the air fryer is actually like to cook in!
One of the things I was keen to do was a whole roast chicken, it’s something that every body always asks to see done in an air fryer. I bought the smallest one which was available which was 1.4kg. We had to position it carefully so that the legs didn’t stick up too much and it looked like it fitted in the drawer pretty well, however it actually sat a little high in the airfryer and after a few minutes of cooking we smelled burning and we noticed it was actually making contact with the heating elements, so we had to rejig it around again and manipulate it till it was lying flatter in the basket and didn’t touch that heating element
However despite our early hiccup it was a success and it was tasty, very moist and cooked in good time, while it was resting I cooked a whole basket of roast vegetables in the same air fryer and I’ve repeated many times over the last couple of weeks because it’s such a simple healthy and easy way to cook sides for a main dish
Now talking of cooking veg, if you do use the presets to cook, one of the features of this air fryer is that the vegetable, fries and shrimp presets have an in built shake reminder which beeps 5 times midway through cooking to remind you to pull the basket out and shake the contents
So I have done a lot of other stuff as well over the last couple of weeks. I also tried cooking brownies and I used my usual 8 inch cake tin and as you can see it fits easily into the basket of the air fryer
I also tried individual mac and cheese portions, salmon fillets, cookies, pastries all of them were a success and I also tried pizzas…
The recipe book that comes with the Cosori air fryer has a recipe for mini pizzas where you cook the base with just olive oil on it and you remove it halfway, add toppings and return it. We did this, got to say it was more than a little tricky to put a floppy pizza base into the pre-warmed basket and not touch the sides with your hands and a little bit awkward to kind of take it out halfway and put toppings on as well, so it was fine, but it wasn’t my favourite thing to cook in the air fryer so I think we’ll stick to doing them in the oven where you can at least do a full size pizza
So just a note on cleaning, because it will have to be done! This is easy to clean, the baskets has a non-stick coating and can go in the dishwasher, so it ticks all the boxes! If grease builds up over time Cosori say in order to protect the non-stick surface they recommend using a baking soda paste to remove and build-up which bonus, is also a very cheap option for cleaning as well
Links to purchase the Cosori 5.5L Air Fryer
