- Air frying, steaming and steam frying in one device
- 9.5L in the MegaBasket or 3L + 6L in separate baskets
- It’s on sale for £258.99 (around $350 / AU$500)
If like me you cook for the family, you’ll know that air fryers tend to involve a compromise: when it comes to capacity and flexibility, you can have one but not both – so for example my Ninja Foodi Max has two baskets offering a combined cooking capacity of 9.5L and multiple modes, but neither basket is big enough for me to roast a very large chicken. Philips’ solution is what it calls the MegaBasket.
The MegaBasket debuts in the Philips Airfryer 5000 Series MegaBasket, which gives you a choice: you can use the single MegaBasket to get 9.5L of cooking capacity, or use split baskets of 3L and 6L respectively.
The 5000 Series also addresses another air fryer irritation: cleaning. Since this cooker has a steam function, you can clean it by steam.
Philips MegaBasket Air Fryer: Main Features and Price
The Airfryer MegaBasket 500 Series offers three types of cooking: air frying, steaming, and what Philips calls SteamFry. This combines air frying and steaming to keep your food nice and juicy in the middle while the air fryer makes the outside crispy. This is especially handy for foods like chicken breasts, which can get terribly dry in a normal air fryer if you don’t marinate them for a good while first. It also helps vegetables retain their nutrients.
Steam offers another important advantage: it is ideal for reheating a Chinese takeaway, an Indian curry or a fried pizza from the day before (I’m in Scotland) without drying it out. As someone who tends to over-order chippy and have leftovers the next day, that’s enough to sell me on the Philips and differentiate it from the Ninja Foodi FlexDrawer, which has a slightly larger capacity but doesn’t have a steam function.
It’s not the largest air fryer you can buy – the aforementioned Ninja has a capacity of 2 x 5.2L or 1 x 10.4L – but the combination of air frying, capacity, steam and a small footprint – the Philips measures just 49.6 x 32.9 x 35.5cm – makes it awfully appealing for family meals and entertaining.
The Philips Airfryer 5000 Series MegaBasket with Steam is priced at £258.99 (around $350 / AU$500) and it’s available now from Amazon UK.
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