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- Three drawers offer plenty of capacity
- Dishwasher-safe parts
- Flat space for pizza
- Big and heavy
- Opening one drawer pauses all cooking
- Longer cooking times with little guidance
Busy families and air frying fans will find lots to love in the Cuisinart Tri Zone 13.6L Air Fryer & Oven. Not only does it offer a pair of 4.3l drawers for cooking flexibility, but underneath it has a secret weapon: a third compartment.
Not only does this boost its capacity – taking it from 8.6l up to a whopping 13.6l – it increases its flat space, so you can grill, toast, and bake pizza. Just like some of the best dual air fryers, both drawers have windows and internal lighting, so you can keep an eye on their progress, and the range of programmes is geared towards being family friendly.
Overall, the Cuisinart Tri Zone 13.6L Air Fryer & Oven proved easy to use, although cooking with it revealed a few aspects that need to be worked around.
Cuisinart Tri Zone 13.6L Air Fryer & Oven review: What do you get for the money?
Unsurprisingly, having three sections makes the Cuisinart Tri Zone 13.6L Air Fryer & Oven a more sizable small appliance: it measures 38 x 40 x 40cm (WxDxH), taking up a fair amount of worktop space compared to rival dual-drawer air fryers – especially in the rear. It’s also pretty heavy at 10.9kg. However, it does cram a lot in: you’ve got two 4.3l ceramic-coated drawers with crisper plates, and a 5l flat section with a crumb tray and oven tray. At its full price of £200, you’re getting a great amount of cooking capacity for your money.
There are six cooking programmes – including air fry, bake, roast and a handy ‘recrisp’ function – all of which can be toggled in time and temperature using a separate set of buttons. These programmes have their own parameters: while you can only air fry for up to an hour at a maximum of 200°C (min 100°C), the dehydrate setting is more flexible, dipping down to 40°C (with a high of 80°C) and running for up to 12 hours, meaning that you could also use it for fermenting yogurt or proofing dough.
Each compartment can be set independently of each other, allowing for greater flexibility: for instance, you might choose to dehydrate fruit at a low temperature in one drawer, while roasting potatoes in the other and baking a focaccia below. The compartments can be synced so they finish at the same time, or matched for simultaneous cooking, and both drawers have windows and internal lights so you can keep an eye on cooking progress.
The flat oven section underneath the drawers is for cooking only: its lowest temperature is 160°C (with a high of 230°C) and its maximum run time is an hour. This means that you’ll be able to bake flatbread in it, but not proof the dough beforehand. Sadly, this section doesn’t have a window or a light either.
What’s it like to use?
With three compartments to contend with, you’d be forgiven for assuming the Cuisinart Tri Zone 13.6L Air Fryer & Oven is a nightmare to programme. Fortunately, that’s far from the case: each section has its own set of controls (although there’s only one start button for both air fryer drawers). And rather than vague icons, there are named buttons to indicate each cooking programme.
Similarly, time and temperature settings are easily selected, with plus and minus buttons for adjusting each. There’s also a shake/turn alert that can be added (a default for some programmes but not all). The controls are all sensibly located, sitting above their corresponding compartments, meaning that you probably won’t even need the instructions to hand after the first use. This is handy because these instructions are skimpy, offering only general advice with no idea of the options for each programme, nor any suggestions of time and temperature for different foods. It’s a minor drawback if you already have air frying experience, but more problematic if it’s your first appliance of this kind.
During testing, a more annoying issue arose when cooking with the two air frying drawers. With many dual air fryers, the drawers fit into their own cavity, allowing you to remove one without interrupting the other’s cooking progress. However, the drawers on the Tri Zone share one single cavity, which means that when one drawer is removed, cooking in the other is paused. You’ll always need to have both drawers inserted to cook anything, which is irritating if you want to clean out one drawer or serve food while the other is cooking. More perplexing is that opening the flat section also pauses the air fryer drawers – despite this having separate walls and its own heating elements.
On the plus side, both drawers and their plates are dishwasher-safe – good for keeping the windows clear – and are equally easy to clean by hand. The flat section’s accessories are handwash only, which is a shame. But again, I found these simple to clean.
It’s worth noting that, at 2,550W, this air fryer is pretty power-hungry compared to smaller models: from cold, one hour’s usage of all three drawers at 200°C consumed 1.370kWh of electricity. At a rate of 25p per unit, this would cost around 34p.
How well does it cook?
As someone who has cooked a lot with air fryers, I felt that the Cuisinart Tri Zone 13.6L Air Fryer & Oven needed more guidance for different foods. Although it performed well overall, I found myself having to cook things for a bit longer than I normally would.
This was especially true when using the flat compartment below the drawers. Owing to the wide amount of space inside – enough for a 12in pizza – it appeared to take a long time for heat to penetrate frozen food. I was able to fit 14 hash browns with room to spare, and opted for the manual setting of 18 minutes at 180°C, turning halfway through. However, at the end, the hash browns were still soft. After adding an additional five minutes on the pizza setting at 230°C, they emerged quite pale though firmer and crispier at corners. The air fryer’s ‘recrisp’ function is also handy when it comes to reheating foods.
The manufacturer’s imagery shows a whole chicken fitting in one of the drawers, but I feel like this is a little misleading. Each drawer has a height of 12cm, or 10cm with the crisper plate in place, meaning that the chicken would have to be pretty small, or perhaps trimmed down, to fit. Not to mention the fact that, again, there’s no cooking time or temperature guidance.
Instead, I managed to fit four whole chicken legs in one of the drawers, with a little bit of overlapping. I chose the roast setting, which requires the turn/shake alert to be added manually. I raised the time to 28 minutes from the default 20, and dropped the temperature to 190°C. This worked well, and the chicken emerged with well-browned, crisp skin. The flesh was cooked through, with no pink remaining.
The default for air frying is 25 mins at 200°C, with a shake halfway through the programme. I chose this for making homemade chips, using soaked and dried potato pieces tossed in a small amount of oil. I shook the basket frequently throughout cooking, yet the chips were still mostly pale after the 25 minutes were up. I ended up cooking for another five minutes before I was happy with the result. There were still pale pieces but most were browned and crisp at the ends.
One final small quirk is that the air fryer fan continues to run after cooking, the buzzing of which may be distracting in an open-plan kitchen.
Should you buy the Cuisinart Tri Zone 13.6L Air Fryer & Oven?
Is three really the magic number? If you’re catering for a crowd or a large family, the Cuisinart Tri Zone 13.6L Air Fryer & Oven offers a serious amount of space and flexibility for the price. I particularly like that you can cook for longer durations at lower heats: a feature that’s not always standard.
Price-wise, it’s cheaper than some dual-drawers, such as the Ninja DoubleStack XL air fryer, while offering far more capacity. Plus, rival “pizza air fryers”, such as Philips 1000 Series (NA150/09) FlexDrawer Dual Basket Air Fryer, come up shorter on overall cooking space.
Perhaps the only pause for thought will be the irritations that you’ll need to work around. Pulling out one drawer shouldn’t pause the other two, and you might find that your favourite recipes need tweaking to achieve the best results. However, the Cuisinart Tri Zone 13.6L Air Fryer & Oven’s sheer versatility and relatively affordable price tag could help you to overlook potential drawbacks.
