Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Two 4-litre drawers
- Sync and match functions
- Well-priced
Cons
- Short cable
- Slightly confusing controls
- Drawer sizes can be restrictive
Our Verdict
This versatile air fryer would suit a smaller, but busy, household. It’s a bit more compact than some dual-drawer rivals, which means a slightly lower capacity (8L instead of 10L) but it won’t take up as much counter space. Altogether, it’s great value for its price point.
Dual-drawer air fryers tend to be large appliances that take up a correspondingly large chunk of counter space. But that doesn’t necessarily need to be the case. Sharp’s dual drawer air fryer has an 8L capacity, but thanks to its squarer shape, it uses dead counter space in front to provide more cooking capacity while using less of the length of your counter.
At 37.5cm wide, it’s more than 10cm shorter than the Ninja FlexDrawer, although it’s just a couple of centimetres shorter than the Ninja Foodi Max Dual Drawer, and both of these have a slightly larger, 10L capacity.
Design and Build
- Dishwasher-safe drawers and trays
- Easy-to-reach controls
- Touchscreen buttons need pressure
The air fryer is black plastic, with a gloss finish for the control panel and a matt finish for the body. Its dimensions are surprising: 37.5cxm wide, 36cm deep and only 30cm high, which means that it won’t dominate your counter. It sits against the wall and, even with its depth, leaves a decent amount of pull-out space in front. Its lower height means that the control panel isn’t as close to the bottom of standard kitchen cabinets – which can be an issue with some air fryer models.
The control panel slants down from the top to about 27cm from the bottom of the air fryer, so it’s easy for even a shorter person to access. It’s easy to use as well. The panel itself has a reminder strip above it so you can easily reference which auto setting relates to which function: be it fries, chicken, fish or pizza.
There are two digital panels, which show the function you’ve chosen for a specific drawer, along with time and temperature settings, with a sync/dual button between them. Below each panel is a set of touchscreen buttons to select the various programmes, time, and temperature for the drawer. You do need a touch of pressure on these buttons – more so than usual – which can throw you a little a first.
Below the control panel are the two 4L drawers, which sit side-by-side. They have chunky handles with a silver trim, and a nice pull-out and click-back movement.
Inside the drawers are two crisper trays, which are non-stick and dishwasher-safe. These trays, which have a high-quality, smooth non-stick surface, have superb black rubber feet at each of the four corners, which look as though they’ll stand the test of time.
You also get a manual and the warranty. The manual is a little bit thin. While it gives you an overview of the various functions, there will still be some trial and error involved.
The cable is not enormously long, so you’ll need to situate the air fryer relatively near to a power point.
Performance and Features
- 12 pre-set programmes
- 8 cooking modes
- Dual-sync ability
Set-up is simple: site the air fryer, wash out the drawers and trays, and then plug it in. We’d advise reading through the manual first as the controls are not entirely self-explanatory.
There are two ways to choose the cooking function for the drawers. You can use one of the preset settings through the auto menu, or you can use the function button.
The auto menu has twelve presets: fries, beef, vegetable, whole chicken, bacon, fish, potato, pizza, chicken nuggets, prawns, snacks, and toasted sandwich. Choose one and it’ll supply a set time and temperature. Then just press start to begin the programme. You can alter the time and temperature of these presets if you wish, although you can’t raise the cooking time by more than 30% to prevent food from burning.
Cooking with the Sharp dual drawer air fryer is easy and convenient
Alternatively, you can use the function button. You have the option of air fry, bake, roast, cook from frozen, dehydrate, keep warm, pre-heat, or reheat. You choose one of these functions, then use the temp/time button to choose the heat and time, and then just press start.
The central sync/dual button allows you to copy a setting from one drawer to the other. Once you set the function and time on the left drawer, you can then copy it to the right. However, if you start cooking, pressing the sync/dual button will set both the cooking functions on each drawer to finish at the same time.
There’s a bit of a learning curve to the controls. We had a struggle figuring out how to cancel a programme after we accidentally copied it from one drawer to another when trying to set the cooking finish times to synchronise.
We started off with cooking a burger and fries in separate drawers, followed by toasting a burger bun. The fries were cooked on auto-menu A01, and they came out golden, crispy and hot. The burger was cooked on the air fry setting at 180°C for 20 minutes, and the result was good: hot, juicy on the inside and crispy on the outside. We synchronised the cooking times, so the programmes finished together.
The bun was cooked on A12 for a toasted sandwich, though only for five minutes, and it came out golden and crunchy.
Next, we cooked chicken legs and roast potatoes: the chicken legs on A04 and the potatoes on A07. The chicken legs were crispy and steaming hot, and the potatoes were crispy, hot and fluffy inside, although we had to take them out before the cooking time ended for a perfect result.
Alex Greenwood / Foundry
Alex Greenwood / Foundry
Alex Greenwood / Foundry
Next was a toasted cheese sandwich on A12 – the result was crispy, the cheese very melted, and we felt that we probably should have taken it out a little earlier.
We also cooked a single breaded cod fillet on the air fryer setting at 180°C for 20 mins, and the sheer convenience of just popping it, setting the programme and not returning until the beep was marvellous. The fish crumb was crispy, the fish inside hot and not overcooked.
The cooking programme pauses automatically when you pull the drawer out, and then restarts when you replace it.
We have to say that cooking with the Sharp dual drawer air fryer is easy and convenient. You can use just one drawer, or use both for different foods, and set them to complete cooking at the same time.
But there’s a price to be paid for its compact design and that’s capacity and flexibility. Each drawer only has 4L of capacity and, unfortunately, this means that you can’t get a typical supermarket garlic baguette into a drawer without chopping it in half. In a full 8L drawer, you can tend to fit such a baguette by placing it diagonally.
Similarly, we found you can only fit about five chicken legs into a 4L drawer (or ten if you double up with the second drawer), so this is very much an air fryer for a smaller household or a busy household where meals need to be prepared in small quantities on a regular basis.
It’s also incredibly easy to clean. The non-stick coating on both the drawers and the trays, and their smaller size, makes washing up far easier because cooking debris doesn’t adhere to the surface. We didn’t even bother putting them in the dishwasher.
Price and Availability
If you can manage with a dual-drawer air fryer that has a lower capacity than Ninja models, the Sharp model is a great buy. Although it has an RRP of £169.99, it’s available for much less. At the time of writing, Appliances Direct has it for just £99. It’s also available from Robert Dyas for £122.99 and from Debenhams for £124.99.
The latest 10L dual zone Ninja Foodi Max (see our review) is around £170-£200, so the Sharp model is very good value. But, if you’d like to see how it compares to other air fryers we’d recommend, have a look at our round-ups of the best air fryers, the best Ninja air fryers and, for more cooking capacity, the best air fryer ovens.
Should you buy the Sharp dual drawer digital air fryer?
We really like the Sharp dual drawer 8L digital air fryer with sync finish. It’s a good price, and it fits the lifestyle of a smaller, busy household that doesn’t need an entire 8L drawer all the time but may want to cook either smaller meals or smaller meals with two types of food in different drawers. We also feel this air fryer would suit a single occupancy household, and not overwhelm a smaller galley kitchen.
The only downside is that there are going to be some items you may struggle to fit inside one of the drawers, but overall, this is a really good air fryer that will suit a certain type of household perfectly.
