I was a late convert to air fryers, in part because I worried about versatility: Just how many wings and nuggets and fries does anyone need? (Don’t answer. The answer will incriminate you.)
The Typhur Dome 2 is the air fryer that obliterated this worry, by adding pizza, browned meats, grilled asparagus, and toasted bread to this list—not to mention perfect crispy bacon. It’s an innovative device that takes over most of the functions of a classic auxiliary oven, but with far more powerful convection.
After testing more than 30 air fryers over the past year, the Dome 2 is the one I far and away recommend as the most powerful, versatile, accurate, and fast air fryer I know. I’ve evangelized for this thing ever since I first tried it last year. But the one big caveat is always the price: It’s listed at $500 and rarely dips much below $400.
So imagine my surprise when I saw the Dome 2 dip to $340 for Amazon’s Spring Sale, the lowest I’ve seen it since Black Friday. If you’ve been hunting for an upgrade to your old basket air fryer, this is probably a good time. The sale lasts until March 31.
Fast, Versatile, App-Controlled Cooks
So why’s the Dome 2 my favorite air fryer? Typhur, a tech-forward company based in San Francisco but with engineering and manufacturing ties to China, reimagined the shape and function of the classic basket fryer by creating a broader and shallower basket, with individually controllable dual heating elements.
This means the Dome 2 has room for a freezer pizza, and can apply direct heat from the bottom to add actual char-speckle and crispness to the crust, kind of like a combination grill-oven. The Dome’s shallow basket also lets you spread out ingredients in a single layer for excellent airflow, while heating from both sides. I can crisp two dozen wings in just 14 minutes (or 17 minutes if I fry hard). The Dome also toasts bread evenly, and crisps bacon without smelling up the house—in part because it has a helpful self-clean function.
Temp accuracy is within 5 or 10 degrees of target, and the fan can adjust its speed depending on the cooking mode. And the smart app is actually useful, with about 50 recipes ranging from asparagus to eclair to a flank steak London broil that can be synced with a button-press. But note that some functions, such as baking, need the app to work, and the device is more of a counter hog than taller basket fryers.
Typhur’s Probe-Assisted Oven Also on Sale
The Dome 2’s basket is a bit shallow for a whole bird or a large roast, however. If you want a convection device for larger meats, I often recommend the Breville Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, which is among my favorite convection toaster ovens. This is a (very) smart oven and air fryer that doesn’t crisp up wings and fries quite as well as basket fryers, but is more versatile for roasting big proteins like a whole chicken. The Breville is also on a nice sale right now, dropping by 20 percent.
A quite promising new air fryer oven from Typhur is also on sale right now. The Typhur Sync Oven is just $250, a modest but welcome $50 off the regular price. I’ve been testing the Typhur Sync since late last year, and it’s a countertop convection oven that comes with a built-in probe that lets you heat up chicken, pork loin, or beef roasts to the desired temperature. The probe affixes to the top of the oven and charges there.
When you remove the probe, the oven automatically goes into probe cook mode. You choose the type of meat you’re cooking, and your preferred doneness, and the oven takes it from there. This works well, though sometimes I wish I had more control and visibility on the oven’s ambient temp while using the probe cook: I do have to let the oven take charge. But the probe assist takes a lot of the guesswork, and worry, out of pork loin especially.
Otherwise, when not using the temperature probe, the Sync is a classic and quite capable air-fryer toaster oven. It toasts bread evenly and keeps temperature accurately. It’s a fairly petite oven in terms of counter footprint, but still big enough for a 6-pound chicken or a 12-inch pizza. You’ll probably get little scorch marks in the aluminized steel drip tray, but this is a known hazard of toaster ovens.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
