TikTok Loves the Ninja Double Stack Air Fryer, and After Cooking a Week’s Meals in It, I Finally Get the Hype

• Value: 18/20
• Versatility: 20/20
• Ease of Use: 20/20
• Quality: 20/20
• Aesthetics: 15/20

Total: 93/100

My first year out of college, I lived with a roommate (and now good friend) who brought an air fryer to the relationship. It sat, small and square, in the corner of the kitchen, a mysterious and complicated entity that somehow always made her meals perfectly while I sweated over the stove. Eventually, curiosity—and the fact that her salmon was always cooked better than mine—got the better of me. I started with toast and worked my way up to full-fledged (albeit easy) dinner recipes. After I got the hang of things, I only turned on the oven or stove for special occasions.

A year later, we moved.

My roommate went back to her hometown; I left for New York sans air fryer. It made sense at the time, given that the average square foot of a NYC apartment is about the size of a pebble, the kitchen an afterthought. But two years have elapsed, and the air fryer has been something I think about embarrassingly often. It hasn’t helped that TikTok has been raving about the Ninja renditions. So, I decided to take the Ninja Double Stack Air Fryer ($230) for a spin. Here’s my review after a week of meals.

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Over the course of a week, I cooked exclusively with the Ninja air fryer, throwing in a variety of foods—fish, vegetables, french fries, empanadas, burritos, etc.—to see how it would perform on foods that had different textures and finishes. I evaluated it on the PureWow100 scale, grading on five attributes: value, versatility, ease of use, quality and aesthetics for a total score out of 100 points.

Admittedly, I am skittish with technology. I can barely operate a TV remote, routinely miss my friends’ tagged stories in Instagram and once called my dad, crying, in California when my stick-shift car stalled on a hill in Alabama. Even my roommate’s air fryer, with its singular control knob, made me leery. So, pulling the Double Stack XL out of the box, I was intimidated. With a ten-quart capacity, it’s huge. (Though, notably, the “regular” size is eight quarts—still large.) That’s not to mention the control panel. I procrastinated for a few days just looking at it. After I got over myself, it was a breezy setup. Call me a nerd, but I love a good manual, and *two* were sitting right on top of the Styrofoam packaging. I especially appreciated the Quick Start Guide, which did away with the need for the denser owner’s manual.

As the name suggests, this Ninja air fryer has two baskets, stacked like a washer-dryer unit, with a single control panel that’s easier to navigate than it looks. There are six cooking functions:

• Air fry
• Air broil
• Bake
• Roast
• Reheat
• Dehydrate

Additionally, there four modes:

• Single basket: Choose your air fryer basket by pressing “1” or “2” on the panel and then setting temperature and cook time.
• Smart Finish: When using both baskets, the air fryer coordinates so your food finishes cooking at the same time.
• Match Cook: Syncs the cook settings for both baskets—best when you’re cooking a large quantity of the same food.
• DoubleStack: For cooking separate foods in one basket (or both) using both the crisper plate and the upper rack insert.

The Ninja Double Stack will streamline your cooking process, so if you’re tight on time or hate meal prepping, I’d say there’s a real value boost. At $230, it’s on the pricier side of air fryer world, but given that you get two baskets, it’s like buying two air fryers in one.

The Ninja’s various cook modes are convenient, and the Double Stack can handle a number of tasks that can replace the need for messily searing, broiling and baking for easy cleanup. Overall, I scored it 93/100 on the PureWow100 scale and personally will be using my oven and stove minimally for the foreseeable future.