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- Compact worktop footprint
- Two separate drawers
- Can cook four foods simultaneously
- Not dishwasher safe
- Only six presets
- Can’t dehydrate or ferment
Some of the best air fryers are dual-drawer models. However, if you don’t have the width on your worktops, or budget for a pricey stacked model such as the Ninja DoubleStack XL, the slimline air fryer from Tower could be a great fit.
Offering more capacity than the Ninja, yet costing half the price, Tower’s Vortx 11 Litre Dual Layer Air Fryer T17190 comes with two internal cooking racks to boost its flat space in two drawers to four levels. Plus, its Max Cook setting means you can finish cooking in both drawers at the same time.
And while the presets are more geared towards food types rather than cooking methods – for example, fries, wings, steak and veg – its clear emphasis on favourite dishes and midweek meals makes it an ideal option for families.
The only place where it doesn’t offer quite as much flexibility as some other air fryers is temperature range and duration. Its maximum running time is an hour, and the lowest temperature is 60°C – meaning you won’t be able to ferment or dehydrate foods – while the max 200°C won’t achieve the super-fast crispiness that higher heats can.
In testing, it performed well, roasting a medium-sized chicken to perfection and crisping up frozen treats, although chips were a mixed bag of good and less so.
What do you get for the money?
Compared to ‘side-by-side’ dual-drawer air fryers, the Tower Vortx T17190 will be a worktop space saver in some kitchens. Two drawers stacked on top of each other means that it’s a relatively slim 26.3cm. However, it’s much taller than those wider models (43.3cm) and significantly deeper (46.5cm). During testing, open drawers tended to overhang my average-depth worktop, while the height may mean it won’t fit under all wall-mounted cabinetry. It’s not especially heavy for its size though, at a trim 7.9kg.
On the plus side, its drawers provide a lot of cooking capacity: each one is 5.5 litres – providing a total of 11 litres – while two wire racks in addition to the cooking plates double the amount of flat space, enabling you to cook on four levels at once. For example, it’s possible to fit a small whole chicken in one, while cooking potatoes in the other, with a rack above them for vegetables.
Another plus is that the drawers are interchangeable and, unless synced, not reliant on the other one being in place, meaning you can cook in one while the other is being cleaned. However, the drawers and inner cooking plates both have some noticeable flex to them, and felt less robust compared to pricier models. None of the removable parts are dishwasher safe.
Compared to some air fryers, it’s fairly high wattage at 2,460W. This means it’s more energy hungry than smaller models when both drawers are in use. One hour’s usage of both drawers at 200°C consumed 0.931 kWh of electricity, which at a rate of 25p per unit would cost around 23p.
What’s it like to use?
I liked that Tower Vortx T17190 came with plenty of usage guidance: settings for each programme are shown and there’s three recipes to get you started, but there aren’t any suggestions for cooking different food types and weights beyond this.
Compared to some air fryers, the digital touch controls have been well thought-out and are straightforward to use even without the instructions at hand. Each programme is named, rather than being represented by an icon, and the time and temperature for each can be adjusted with plus and minus buttons.
Both drawers are numbered with their own button, making it easy to pause or change settings even once cooking has started. Match Cook allows you to duplicate settings on both drawers, while Smart Finish syncs differently programmed drawers so they finish cooking at the same time. Each programme has a turn/shake alert built into it too, but this only kicks in three-quarters of the way through cooking, rather than halfway, and can’t be adjusted (you also won’t be able to do much shaking if you’re using one of the cooking rack inserts too). If you need to shake halfway, you’ll need to remember yourself or set your own timer.
There are other quirks to work around. One is that there’s a single button for switching between time and temperature settings, but once you’ve pressed it to select time, it quickly flicks back to temperature. This means if you’re checking duration for a recipe, it’s easy to accidentally change the temperature instead of the time. Another is that once the air fryer starts cooking, it only displays the countdown time, rather than cycling between time and temperature or displaying both. When synced, opening one drawer pauses both. However, once synced, adding time to one drawer doesn’t add it to the other.
Maintenance is where this air fryer can be the most frustrating. During testing, food and grease stuck to the drawers and racks, yet no parts of it are dishwasher safe. This meant a soak was in order. However, at the back of each drawer, there are holes right down to the base for air flow, so the whole drawer needs to be submerged in the sink. The other downside to these holes is that tipping the drawer slightly when removing food causes collected oil and juices to run out, causing worktop mess.
How well does it cook?
As there’s little indication of times and temperatures for cooking different foods or food from the freezer, I wasn’t sure of the settings to use for frozen hash browns.
I opted for 18 mins at 200°C on its ‘DIY’ programme. The drawer comfortably fitted nine hash browns, which could be doubled to 18 with the wire rack in place. This provided a turn/shake alert with 4 mins 40 secs left to run: realistically, too late for even browning on both sides. Despite this, the resulting hash browns came out with crispy exteriors and soft interiors, although I noticed that some were a little drier than others.
I was able to fit a medium-sized chicken (1.5kg) in a drawer without issue. There’s no roast setting – a common programme on air fryers – so I chose a similar heat for an air fryer roast (190°C) for 60 minutes: the maximum run time. I turned the chicken over halfway through, not when the alert sounded much later on. After an hour, the chicken was thoroughly cooked, with no pink flesh remaining, and below the rack there was plenty of fat and juice run off. The skin wasn’t as crisp as other air fryers would have achieved, but it was golden brown.
At the same time, I cooked homemade chips in the other drawer, using the fries programme with the time increased to 22 minutes to allow for the omission of parboiling that the instructions recommended. I shook the drawer numerous times during cooking, not just when alerted. The resulting chips were a mixed bag: alongside some very pale pieces, some were well browned and a few were much crunchier than others. Most would have benefitted from a longer cooking time at a lower heat.
Should you buy the Tower Vortx 11 Litre Dual Layer Air Fryer T17190?
For the price, Tower’s Vortx 11 Litre Dual Layer Air Fryer offers a lot: family dinner-sized capacity, four-level cooking, and a worktop footprint that might not save you much on depth but definitely will on width.
I especially liked that, for the most part, it was easy to programme even if you haven’t used an air fryer before or don’t have the instructions: something I consider a must for households with hectic schedules.
However, there are some elements to work around: you may need to test and adjust times and temperatures for certain foods to get the best results, while cleaning its greasy parts by hand will be a chore most won’t relish.
If you’re a dishwasher devotee, the more robust Ninja DoubleStack XL would be a better buy, as it has dishwasher-safe parts. Similarly, if space is less of an issue and versatility more important, there are double-drawer air fryers with more functionality: for instance, the Instant Vortex Plus Dual Drawer might have less cooking space, but at a similar price point it includes reheat and dehydrate programmes that Tower’s Vortx 11 Litre Dual Layer Air Fryer doesn’t offer.
