HYSapientia 24l Air Fryer Oven

Verdict

HYSapientia’s Air Fryer Oven might be too large for the smallest kitchens, but it could be ideal for big families living in big homes. Capable of grilling, baking, roasting or frying several dishes at once, it’s very versatile when used alongside or instead of a conventional oven. While it’s not always easy to operate – and its timer expires with a gutless, single beep – it could help you save energy when cooking a family meal.

Introduction

Most air fryers come with one or two baskets and can hold from about four to twelve litres of food. This monster from Hyasapentia is different.

As the name suggests, it’s an oven/air fryer hybrid, with a big 24-litre compartment that can swallow up the largest meals. It comes with a baking tray, rack and frying basket, which can be used together to cook three different foods at once. As if that wasn’t enough, the Air Fryer Oven also has a powered rotisserie, so you can use it to roast whole chickens or other large joints of meat.

This oven is rated at 1800W, which is about the same as a modern fitted oven. However, with powerful air circulation and a quicker warm-up time, it’s likely to consume less power, potentially helping bring down the cost of cooking.

Design and features

• Very smart in stainless steel
• Slightly awkward controls
• Dishwashable trays

The HYSapientia Air Fryer Oven is about the size of a large microwave, but significantly taller. Finished in stainless steel, it’s extremely smart from the front or sides, although less so if you can see the black plastic air scoop fitted to the back.

Open the door and you’ll find a fairly conventional-looking oven space, even if it’s only just over half the width of a typical fitted oven. Heating elements are hidden top and bottom, while a top-mounted fan circulates air vigorously.

This air fryer is controlled by a single circular dial, combined with a set of function and shortcut buttons, and a large mono display.

Turn it on and you can use the dial to select from eight presets covering everything from fish to pizza, or choose and customise the baking mode. In most cases you can tweak the programme temperature and time, and even select one of the two available fan speeds.

HYSapientia supplies this oven with a baking tray, baking rack, frying tray and rotisserie skewer, but you can buy extras of each, or even a 1.7-litre rolling grill basket that works with the rotisserie motor.

It comes bundled with a small silicone oven glove, which doesn’t offer full protection to your hand, even if it is great for Emu impressions.

This is a big contraption to have permanently on the countertop, and as such it’s not really ideal for smaller kitchens. It looks extremely smart, but as with all stainless steel appliances, it’s quick to pick up fingerprints, which can literally take the shine off it.

HYSapientia recommends the oven is placed with at least 10cm of clearance behind and above for cooling, but its outer walls get hot when the oven’s in use and stay hot for some time afterwards – the screen displays ‘HOT’ to remind you. Happily, there are four rubber pads to keep the feet planted.

I found this oven’s controls a little awkward and annoying. Most inputs result in a loud chime, which you can’t turn off, and yet when a cooking programme is finished, there’s a single beep that isn’t repeated. If you’re in another room, it’s easy to miss. The programmes are a curious mix of stubborn and relaxed: you can change the duration of them all, but many have a maximum temperature.

With long-term use you’d get used to it, but I tended to prefer the free temperature and time selection mode. This lets you select temperatures from 60-230°C in 5°C increments, and times from 5-60 minutes. Even this is slightly limited, as the fan is locked to its higher speed. One other curiosity is that the display shows ‘OFF’ constantly when the oven is supposedly off, which seems self-contradictory.

While fingerprints may be a problem on the oven’s shiny outer panels, HYSapientia has built its interior from a more utilitarian steel, which looks hard-wearing. The various trays are all dishwashable and, because they’re smaller than those for a standard oven, easier to fit into a standard or slimline dishwasher. My one gripe is that they seem like a snug fit in the grooves in the oven sides.

Performance

• Good cooking
• Quite noisy on higher fan speed
• Not especially efficient

To begin, I cooked thick oven chips from frozen, selecting the maximum 230°C for 18 minutes, and adding the chips immediately without waiting for a warm up.

It was a strong start, producing impressive chips that were light and fluffy on the inside, and delightfully crisp on the outside. My only criticism was that the results were just slightly uneven – the thinner layer of chips in one corner were slightly overdone.

I suspect this success was down in part to this oven’s high maximum temperature, but also its highly perforated frying basket, which does a much better job of letting hot air circulate than a standard baking tray or the bucket you get with a regular air fryer. You do need to place the baking tray below it to catch drips, or otherwise, remember to remove the crumb tray for cleaning.

HYSapientia says this oven gets to temperature within about four minutes, and my tests backed this up. That’s quicker than many full-sized ovens, which means you’re wasting less electricity before you’ve started cooking.

In practice you can start loading food before the oven’s fully up to temperature, which could reduce your bills a bit further.

That said, the Air Fryer Oven isn’t an ideal choice if energy saving is a priority. It’s much bigger than many air fryers, with a bigger space to heat. Although rated at a reasonably modest 1800W, I measured its consumption at 2010W.

With the heating elements off, the fan and light together still accounted for 63W. I was in for a shock when checking my power meter after cooking those chips – it had used 0.59 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity: about twice what I’d expect from a standard air fryer, and about 16p at October 2023 rates. The Samsung Bespoke Series 6 NV7B6685AAN/U4 Oven with Dual Cook can do the same job with less power, using half the oven space.

To be fair, this is a much bigger cooker than a regular air fryer, and it could work out the same or cheaper if you often use its capacity to the full. For example, I used 0.55kWh when cooking frozen chips and Quorn nuggets in the Salter Dual Air, and 0.53kWh to cook a similar meal in the HYSapientia Air Fryer Oven – which still had a baking tray free on which I could have cooked pizza, quiche or roasted vegetables. That said, the tray’s 25x30cm dimensions mean it won’t quite hold a 12” pizza. Perhaps that’s for the best if you’re already cooking chips and nuggets.

I was generally happy with all the results of my cooking, but found that trays placed in the bottom slot were very close to the lower heating elements, which tended to overheat them. When cooking two pizzas, the baking tray became very hot and almost burned the base of the bottom one – fortunately, I moved it just before too much damage was done.

This is an excellent air fryer if you use its basket, which removes the need to shake mid-way through the programme. Baked or roasted potatoes also came out very well but, given that three out of the four people in my family are vegetarian, I wasn’t able to test the rotisserie mode beyond verifying that the relevant programme seemed to work properly.

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