Instant Vortex Plus with Rotisserie Review

The Instant Vortex Plus with Rotisserie air fries well, but we found its other cooking modes slightly disappointing. If we were to live with one of these devices in our kitchen, we feel we would only really use its air frying function, and in that case, there are better options on the market.

Cooking Performance

The Vortex Plus with Rotisserie did quite well in our air frying tests. In fact, it produced some of the best sweet potato fries we've ever cooked with an air fryer — a notoriously difficult task for most air fryers. It also performed exceptionally in making tater tots, as the rotation of the basket made them come out near perfectly even and golden. It struggled a bit more to get a good crisp on onion rings and doughnuts but was still able to cook both dishes with aplomb.

Its various other functions, including baking, toasting, dehydrating, and rotisserie cooking, all worked relatively well in our tests. However, the non-traditional size and shape of the device limits what exactly you can cook in baking or toasting mode.

User Friendliness

Overall, this product is quite easy to use. In particular, its touchscreen interface is clear and intuitive. This is key, as the device has many cooking settings to navigate through. All multifunction air fryers have to make some sacrifice in air frying convenience in order to offer other cooking features, and this product is no exception.

You can air fry either with the rotisserie basket or with one of its two trays. The trays must be carefully handled with potholders as they get hot during cooking. The rotisserie requires a special tool to remove, and then it must be handled with potholders. Either of these options are less convenient than the built-in handles on the fry baskets of most dedicated air fryers. In many cases, multifunction air fryers make up for these inconveniences with their versatility. In our opinion, this is not one of those devices.

Ease of Cleaning

All of the cooking accessories, including the fry basket, the rotisserie rack, and the baking sheets, are dishwasher safe. Like all oven-style multifunction devices, the difficulty in cleaning comes if a recipe splatters and gets the inside of the baking chamber dirty. In that case, you have to somewhat awkwardly scrub out and dry the inside of the oven.

Temperature Accuracy

The VortexPlus is one of the lower performers in our temperature accuracy tests. In general, our calibrated testing thermometers read 15-30˚ over the set temperature, occasionally getting as much as 50˚ above the expected temperature. We didn't see too many negative consequences of this in our cooking results, but it does seem it would be easy to dry out food given how hot this device can run.

Should You Buy the Instant VortexPlus with Rotisserie?

The Instant Vortex Plus with Rotisserie performs quite well as an air fryer, but we weren't impressed enough with its additional features and functions to ignore the idiosyncrasies that those features bring along.

What Other Air Fryers Should You Consider?