Ninja Foodi FlexDrawer review

At a glance

Expert's Rating

Pros

Cons

Our Verdict

This is, quite simply, one of the best air fryers we’ve ever tested. It’s easy to use and powerful – which means quick cooking. And it cooks evenly without the need to pause and shake up your food. But its key advantages are its flexibility and huge capacity, which you can use for baking and roasting.

Price When Reviewed

$149.99 (MSRP $179.99)

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Retailer Price

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The FlexDrawer isn’t Ninja’s latest dual-drawer air fryer (that’s the Double Stack XL) but it is one of the brand’s best models. I might say it’s the best model the brand has produced.

It’s a unique twist on a dual-basket air fryer, in that you can remove the divider separating the two cooking spaces to create one cooking “megazone”.

You’ll get all the flexibility of a traditional model, as you can use the two 5.2L cooking areas independently and programme separate cooking modes in each.

But you can also use the entire 10.4L space to cook large joints and bake cakes and bread.

If you’re in the US, a slightly different model is available. Instead of the FlexDrawer, you can buy the FlexBasket. It’s a smaller, 7QT model and lacks the UK model’s proving setting, which you can use when making fresh bread. It also has slightly different controls to the UK model: it’s button operation only, whereas the UK model has a dial to choose the cooking mode. Apart from those differences, it’s designed and works in the same way, so you can read this review to get an idea of whether it’d be a good fit for you.

Design and Build

The FlexBasket is largely made of plain, matt black plastic and thanks to its size, there is really quite an expanse of it. It certainly won’t be the prettiest appliance on your countertop. With its curved corners and plain exterior, it looks like a giant, lidded tub. But it’s sturdily built and its unfussy exterior makes it easy to keep clean.

It’s a big appliance as well, with dimensions of 32.7cm high, 31.6cm deep and a whopping 49.6cm wide. It will take up a huge amount of space along your countertop, although as it’s not very deep, you’ll have plenty of room in front of it for food preparation and to pull out the drawer.

Although I have a tiny kitchen and needed to rearrange my counter to find room for it, I found that it actually seemed to overwhelm the available space less than the Double Stack, which is a much deeper air fryer that protrudes beyond the line of other countertop appliances.

There’s a single, pull-out drawer with a removable divider. It’s fitted with two non-stick, dishwasher-safe crisper plates (although you can’t put the drawer itself in the dishwasher). The cooking space is huge at 10.4L and can fit a joint of meat, chicken or loaf cake.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

The FlexDrawer has seven cooking modes: max crisp (for frozen food), air fry, roast, bake, reheat (for leftovers), dehydrate (for jerky and dried fruit) and prove (for dough). Choose one and a suggested time and temperature will appear on the easy-to-read digital display. You can then adjust it as you wish. The controls are intuitive and straightforward and it’s unlikely you’ll need to refer to the manual.

Still, the supplied manual is comprehensive and includes a number of recipes and an air fryer cooking chart with suggested times and temperatures for popular foods.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

There are no settings for specific food types, like chips, which you might find on other air fryers. But the cooking mode is easy to decide on. Your best bet is then to use the mode’s suggested time and temperature and tweak it as needed.

Time and temperature are adjustable for each cooking setting (within certain boundaries – ie, if you set too high a temperature, you won’t be dehydrating fruit or meat, you’ll be roasting it).

The FlexDrawer has a minimum temperature of 35°C and a maximum temperature of 240°C and the cooking time is between 1 minute and six hours, again depending on the cooking mode. This means that you can cook almost anything in it, except for dishes like stews, pasta and rice, which won’t come out brilliantly even if you use a silicone liner. If that’s the kind of food you cook often, we’d recommend the Ninja Speedi or the ProCook Air Fryer Health Grill.

The FlexDrawer has all the features you’d expect to make two-basket air fryer cooking simple. There’s a match function, which allows you to copy the cooking programme from one drawer to the other, plus a sync function. Sync lets you set two separate cooking programmes but ensures they’ll finish at the same time, so there’s no need to keep one dish warm while you wait for the other to finish cooking.

It’s also worth saying that it’s a very civilised sort of air fryer. Like all newer Ninja models, it’ll greet you with a ‘Hello’ on the screen when you switch it on, and a ‘Goodbye’ when you turn it off. Plus, its alert sounds are loud enough to be heard from the next room (although probably not over the sound of the TV), without being piercing or prolonged.

Performance and Features

The FlexDrawer is a powerful air fryer. It’s a 2,470W appliance, which means that it’ll be pricier to run than your average air fryer. You can use an online energy calculator to find out what it’ll cost. You’ll get the most accurate reading if you know your tariff.

But what I’d say about the FlexDrawer is that it’s so powerful that you’ll be using it for shorter periods of time and on a lower setting than you would rivals, which will offset the cost somewhat. And if you can avoid using your oven for most of your cooking, you’ll certainly save money.

When first using the FlexDrawer, I tended to overcook everything. My tip for using it would be to turn down the temperature 10°C below your usual air fryer setting and see how it performs. Once I got used to its power, however, everything I cooked came out well: crunchy toasties with gooey melted cheese, crispy fries and potatoes, chewy gnocchi.

I loved its larger size and abandoned my oven almost immediately. Its capacity meant I could roast a whole butternut squash for soup.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

I thought the lack of a shake alert would be an issue, which was something I found with the Double Stack, but if you place food on the crisper plates and make sure not to crowd the drawer, it cooks so evenly that you won’t need it.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

However, there’s one thing that even the FlexDrawer can’t find space for: a large supermarket pizza. You’ll only be able to cook one half at a time, although there would probably be enough room for two mini pizzas.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

The real revelation with the FlexDrawer was baking. I’d never quite mastered air fryer baking before but as the FlexDrawer has more than enough space for a full-sized loaf tin, I thought I’d give it a go. A first attempt saw the cake fail to rise properly as its exterior cooked before its interior and crusted over, so although it was edible, it was dense.

The secret turned out to be dropping the temperature to just 140°C (the recipe called for 160°C in a fan-assisted oven or 180°C in a regular oven). With no need to preheat, I had a perfect lemon drizzle cake in 25 minutes – it takes 40 minutes in my oven.

Emma Rowley / Foundry

Price and Availability

The FlexDrawer has an RRP of £269.99 but it’s now widely available for £219. You can buy it from AO.com, Argos, Amazon, or direct from Ninja. At the time of writing, it’s £50 less than the Double Stack. However, if you don’t think you’ll make use of the ‘megazone’, Ninja’s latest Foodi dual-drawer model is a better buy.

In the US, the smaller, 7QT FlexBasket is available from Ninja, Best Buy, Walmart and Amazon for $149.99, down from $180. Again, this makes it an attractive option when compared to other new Ninja models, although its cooking capacity is significantly less than that of the UK version.

Verdict

The FlexDrawer is easily one of the best air fryers I’ve tested. It won’t give you as many cooking options by food type as combination models like the Ninja Speedi or the ProCook Air Fryer Health Grill, which can grill and cook pasta and rice, but its capacity and flexibility makes it the best oven replacement among dual-drawer models.

If you’re looking for an even larger capacity, have a look at our round-up of the best air fryer ovens we’ve tested, and if you’re not sure which Ninja model is right for you, see our round-up of the best Ninja air fryers. All the best air fryers we’ve tested, across all brands and types, are in our best air fryers round-up.