Quest 5.5 Litre 33889 Air Fryer

In a crowded market of air fryers, Quest’s 5.5 Litre model offers a good mixture of family-sized capacity, affordability and handy presets for commonly cooked foods. For a sub-£100 air fryer, it’s also surprisingly sleek, thanks to its touch controls, digital display and metallic exterior. The only real downside is the amount of space it takes up in a small kitchen: a large surface area for cooking inside translates to a wide, deep air fryer that tends to hog the worktop.

Introduction

If you’ve ever overloaded an air fryer basket with food, even one of the best air fryers, you’ll know that the results tend to be soggy in places rather than crisp. The answer is more surface area inside the basket so food has room to move around and crisp up perfectly. Quest’s 5.5 Litre Air Fryer comes with just such a basket, meaning you can load it up with enough food for a family dinner and achieve consistently golden-brown results.

In addition, its range of everyday food presets take the effort out of remembering the right temperatures and cooking times for everything from homemade chips to chicken, steak and seafood.

Design and features

• LED digital touch controls
• Manual or preset cooking 
• Cool-touch handle 

While it’s not the largest or heaviest air fryer – that prize may well belong to the Ninja Foodi MAX Dual Zone – Quest’s 5.5 Litre Air Fryer is still pretty substantial at 31cm wide and 37cm deep with a weight of 6.2kg. However, this means that not only is there plenty of cooking capacity in its 5.5-litre basket, but it’s well spread out, delivering a large flat surface of almost 23cm x 23cm that can accommodate a small whole chicken, small pizza, or a cake for example. The basket itself detaches from the drawer with the push of a button but for safety, there’s a cover that slides over to stop it being released by accident when shaking. A handle that stays cool means you won’t have to don an oven glove every time your chips need a toss. Both the drawer and basket are dishwasher safe.

Touch screen controls (that only show when the air fryer is on) are pretty straightforward. Manual cooking can be toggled up or down by time (up to 60 minutes) and temperature (80-200°C), although the default when turned on of 15 minutes at 200°C is handy. Programmes are less obvious: they’re hidden until the M button is pressed – confusingly, this could stand for mode or manual – which also serves to cycle through them. There’s some useful ones, such as fries, chicken and fish, as well as those you may use less often, such as cake. The instructions don’t cover the times and temperatures for these programmes, so you’ll have to scroll through them to get an idea of what each one offers.

Performance

• Good heat distribution
• Thorough and fast cooking
• Can be noisy 

I started by cooking chips in the air fryer, using the fries preset of 18 mins at 200°C and 400g potato in half a tablespoon of oil. For the best results, a three-minute preheat was advised and regular tossing. The potato started to brown after about 7 mins and needed 16 of the 18-minute preset before starting to singe. However, the results were evenly cooked – soft and fluffy in the middle, and although not super crispy on the exterior, still tasty. While the presets are a feature that sets this air fryer apart from cheaper models, there’s not a lot of guidance for using them in the instructions, nor the default cooking time and temperature for each (although it is useful that the presets can be toggled in the same way as the manual settings). There is, however, a table of cooking times and temperatures for different foods in the instructions.

Next, I used the air fryer to cook sausages. I used the roast preset of 180°C and a cooking time of 20 minutes. This was plenty to cook them – they didn’t burn and were thoroughly cooked and crisp on the outside. The fat ran off them well too, helping to make this a healthier dish. Finally, I cooked hash browns from frozen using the manual setting of 200°C, which took about 20 minutes. They emerged golden brown and crisp rather than soggy and singed, which can happen when oven cooking.

There are a couple of flaws that came to light while reviewing. One is that there are rubber feet on the basket to prevent it shifting around inside the drawer, but one of ours kept popping off. As these are so small, they would be easily lost over time. The other is that beeps are quite harsh when setting the air fryer – and there didn’t appear to be a way of turning them off. Plus, the air fryer is noisy when in operation: I found it drowned out quiet conversation when standing near it. Also, the stainless-steel exterior shows fingerprints easily, although it’s simple to wipe clean.

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