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- Dual or single zone drawer
- Dishwasher-safe parts
- Space-saving design
- Minimal instructions provided
- 1hr max cooking duration
- Large drawer awkward to wash by hand
Just like some of the best dual air fryers, the Philips 1000 Series FlexDrawer comes with one 7.1l drawer that splits into two compartments with a divider. With the divider removed, this allows you to cook up to 800g of chips, 1.2kg of vegetables or a small whole chicken – more than enough to feed a family of four.
Yet even though it’s roomy inside, the footprint is more compact kitchen-friendly than you might expect: rather than being excessively wide, it’s deep and not especially tall. It offers a range of programmes, with six presets mostly themed around food types (steak, drumsticks etc) to suit busy lifestyles. Perhaps the only limitation is its maximum running time of just one hour: making dehydrating and proofing dough less feasible, even though it offers a low minimum temperature of 40°C.
In testing, the air fryer performed well overall. Beyond a couple of niggles, you’d be hard pressed to find a model of this capacity at this price that offers ease of use and low maintenance.
What do you get for the money?
If one of the best small air fryers is limiting but you don’t want to invest in a bigger beast, such as the 11-litre Tower Vortx Dual Layer Air Fryer T17190, a mid-sized air fryer is a good option.
Offering a 7.1l drawer that divides into two – allowing you to cook on a big or small scale – the Philips 1000 Series NA150/09 7.1L FlexDrawer Dual Basket Air Fryer is at home both in a family household or smaller. Plus, as it measures 43.7 x 30.1 x 29.4cm (WDH, including the drawer handles, which jut out beyond the body) it can scoot below wall cabinetry when not in use. However, it’s more of a worktop hog to the rear: at the back, there’s a plastic buffer that juts out to ensure airflow space when in use. When it’s not in use, though, it just prevents you from placing the air fryer flush against the wall. The air fryer isn’t especially heavy either at 5.8kg, so can move around the kitchen if required.
Its range of programmes is mid-sized as well: while there’s more than the skimpy selection sometimes found on compact air fryers, the menu isn’t huge. There’s a capsule collection of six presets, including reheat, with a temperature range of 40-200°C and a 60-minute runtime – that’s a bit more limiting than models that also offer low heat cooking. However, it lives up to its claim of flexibility otherwise: adding the divider means you can cook in either the left or right section, at different times and temperatures or there’s a ‘copy’ button to duplicate one section’s settings for the other. There’s also a ‘sync’ option so both drawers finish at the same time.
A final couple of handy features include the ‘back’ button – in case you’re in a hurry and choose the wrong settings, you don’t have to start from scratch – and a ‘shake alert’ to remind you to turn food. This is a dedicated button, which is more convenient than some air fryers make it.
Given that there’s potentially a pretty large space to heat, this air fryer demands a hefty 2,450W of power to operate. Yet once it’s hot, it’s not as thirsty as you might expect: one hour’s usage of the whole drawer, divider removed, at 200°C consumed 0.754 kWh of electricity, which at a rate of 25p per unit would cost around 18p.
What’s it like to use?
While some dual-drawer air fryers can be a head-scratcher to programme, here the display is simple. Turning it on gives you the option of selecting either the whole drawer or a single pan, and each programme has its own button to select it (so no scrolling through). Time and temperature up and down buttons sit at either side of the panel. In essence, it’s so intuitive, you could programme it without the instructions. This is a good thing, as only pictorial and safety instructions are included: annoyingly, you’ll have to download the full manual online to see any cooking guidance.
Design extends beyond the easy-to-use controls. For example, the drawer has two max fill levels marked on the inside: the lower one is marked for frozen chips, while the other is a maximum overall if you’re cooking larger items. I found the back button more useful than expected: rather than hitting it for programming errors, as it goes back several stages, I used it to move onto the next cook. I also liked the shake alert – loud enough to be heard from another room but not a harsh sound.
Cleaning up afterwards was straightforward as the divider, drawer and cooking plates are dishwasher safe. It was also simple to clean by hand, but as the drawer is big, I found it tricky to wash it in a standard-sized sink.
How well does it cook?
Even with the downloaded manual to hand, which includes times and temperatures for different foods, I sometimes found it a challenge to work out how long to cook some items in the Philips 1000 Series FlexDrawer. For example, the manual gives a frustratingly broad cooking time of 10-22 minutes for 800g of frozen spring rolls. I found it more reliable to check on food as it cooked.
There’s no suggested programme for frozen food, so for hash browns from the freezer I opted for tweaking the default setting when turning the air fryer on. This was a temperature of 180°C with a time of 20 minutes, which I raised by a few minutes more. I added the shake alert, which sounded halfway through to turn them over, and also three-quarters of the way through. Seven hash browns fitted snugly in the left drawer section. The resulting hash browns were crisp and crunchy on the outside, not dry inside, with a good level of golden brown at the edges and corners.
For making chips from scratch, I used the whole width of the single drawer with the divider removed. I cooked 800g thicker chips tossed in a small amount of oil using the frozen fries programme adjusted to 33 minutes at 180°C. The shake alert sounded twice but I tossed them more frequently.
In retrospect, it may have been better to cook these with the divider in place, as once it was removed, smaller pieces of potato fell into the gap between the plates where it would have been. What the whole drawer does offer though is plenty of space for chips to move around as they’re shaken, which resulted in a near-perfect batch. Chips featured even browning, texture and bubbling, with lots of tasty crunchy bits, and no pale pieces remaining.
While the drawer is wide and deep enough for a whole chicken, there isn’t much height clearance. This means that you’re limited as to how large the bird can be. The instructions recommend up to 1.4kg – but it can be hard to find smaller chickens. Mine was 1.5kg, and required pressing down slightly so that it didn’t graze the heating element inside. Turning the chicken over posed the same problem of squashing it down. This can be time consuming, and the air fryer beeped when the drawer was left open for too long.
A roasting time of 40-50 minutes at 180°C was recommended for a 1.4kg bird: as the chicken being cooked was a little heavier, I opted for the 50 minutes duration. The resulting chicken was deep brown on the outside, with drumsticks that were overcooked as the skin stuck to the flesh. The breast was better: still fairly moist but slightly dry in places, suggesting that less time would have yielded a better result.
Should you buy the Philips 1000 Series (NA150/09) FlexDrawer Dual Basket Air Fryer?
For those who want a simple air fryer without frills that doesn’t take up a lot of space, the Philips 1000 Series NA150/09 7.1L is an ideal option. It feels robust, is easy to use and clean, plus it handles most foods well – though you might find you initially spend a lot of time fiddling with settings.
For this reason, it’s better for someone au fait with air frying rather than a newbie – making it a suitable upgrade for those who have outgrown their existing appliance or worn out a cheaper model. That said, capacity could still be an issue: larger families may prefer a roomier stacked model, such as Ninja’s Foodi Dual Zone Air Fryer.
However, if what you’re looking for is an air fryer that’s neither too big, nor too small, the Philips 1000 Series NA150/09 7.1L is just right for your medium-sized household.
