Ninja Crispi 4-in-1 Portable Air Fryer review: A portable air fryer?

While most air fryers consist of a removable cooking basket and a large main unit, the Ninja Crispi is set up very differently. It seems that, after giving people a few years to warm up to the idea of air fryers, manufacturers are ready to shake up the countertop cooker’s traditional format with innovative designs and functions.

Recently, we reviewed an air fryer with vertical cooking baskets, one built low and flat to better cook pizzas and now the Ninja Crispi, designed to take air frying on the go. Its portable Power Pod lid contains the heating mechanism and simply needs to be plugged in and placed on one of Ninja’s Tempware glass containers (it won’t work with a regular glass dish, I’m afraid). These glass cooking dishes also come with separate lids, so you can take leftovers as lunch or cook meals on-to-go, wherever you’ve got access to a socket.

Initially, I wondered if the Crispi’s Power Pod alone could match the performance of a full-size air fryer and whether all the dishes and lids would actually come in handy. The answer is mostly, with a few caveats.

Ninja Crispi 4-in-1 Portable Air Fryer review: What do you get for the money?

The Ninja Crispi arrives with a price tag of £180. For that money, you’ll get the Power Pod Lid, two differently-sized cooking dishes, each with their own crisper plate and storage lids, and a further adaptor lid for attaching the Crispi’s Power Pod to the larger cooking container. The box also includes an instruction manual and a short recipe guide with cooktime charts.

The 1,700W Powder Pod lid weighs 1.9kg, making it light enough to hold with one hand and easy to grip thanks to the indentations on the top. The Power Pod also houses the Crispi’s simple range of controls: a power button, buttons for time selection and one for switching between its four cooking modes: Keep Warm, ReCrisp, Roast and Air Fry. The unit, when attached to the largest container, measures a neat 30.5 x 34 x 34.5cm (WDH). The 90cm power cord, while it does help the Crispi portable, was a little short for my liking, but that’s mainly down to the awkward socket layout in my kitchen.

The two glass containers included with the Crispi are designed for cooking, serving and storage and are heatproof, thermal-shock resistant, microwaveable and dishwasher-safe. The small cooking dish has a 1.4l capacity, while the larger dish can fit up to 3.8l. These dishes also have a heatproof moulding attached to the outside of the glass, which forms handles for carrying and legs for minimising heat contact on surfaces.

Looking at models in the same price range as the £180 Ninja Crispi, we find some pretty stiff competition. The Our Place Wonder Oven (£195) was recently named our Home Product of the Year at our annual product awards ceremony, taking home the top prize thanks to its aesthetic appeal, roomy interior and impressive cooking performance in testing. If you’d prefer a dual drawer air fryer to an oven-style model, you could potentially pick up the oft-discounted Ninja Foodi Dual Zone (£200) for less than the price of the Crispi. Our favourite Ninja air fryer, the Dual Zone, has two syncable 3.8l baskets and six cooking modes, including the brand’s classic Max Crisp features, which boosts temperatures to 240°C. If the compactness of the Crispi is its most appealing feature for you, then you may also want to peruse our round-up of the best small air fryers.

Ninja Crispi 4-in-1 Portable Air Fryer review: What’s it like to use?

While it may initially look like it has a lot of bits and bobs when you unbox it, the Ninja Crispi is mercifully easy to set up and use. For the smaller cooking container, all I needed to do was place the Power Pod lid on top of it and it was basically good to go, no clicking or clipping necessary. For the larger container, I did have to attach the Power Pod to an adaptor lid but I found it clicked together and apart without any fuss.

Once set up, the Crispi continues to be simple to operate, offering a very straightforward set of controls. Simply press the Mode button and an indicator light will move between its four functions, showing which is selected. Once you’ve picked either Keep Warm, ReCrisp, Roast or Air Fry and set your cook time with the timer buttons, you’re good to go. 

The Crispi’s controls are so simple in fact, that they don’t even include a temperature selection option. Instead of selecting your own temperature, Ninja offers a guide range for its four modes. This range starts at 70°C for its Keep Warm setting, then increases for ReCrisp and Roast, finally topping out on Air Fry, which it says “cooks like a 200°C oven.” Whether the lack of direct temperature control is a technical limitation or an intentional streamlining of design, I can’t say I’m a massive fan of this omission. If you’re going to suggest I cook chicken in an appliance, I would feel more comfortable setting an exact temperature than depending on a cooking chart or guide range. [Note: I contacted Ninja for further guidance on these temperature ranges and the brand confirmed the Crispi maxes out at 185°C on its Air Fry setting, which they deem roughly equivalent to the cooking power of a 200°C oven.]

Design-wise, I was impressed with the Crispi thanks to some neat touches. I found I could adjust the timer while cooking and that the device automatically paused when I lifted the Power Pod lid to give items a shake. Better still, the glass container allowed me to keep an eye on my dishes as they cooked.

The heatproof undercoating of the two containers also meant that on the lower power modes none of the heat emanating from the air fryer reached the surface underneath it, though I did notice some warmth on my countertop after using the Crispi on its air fryer setting. The Crispi still has to ventilate and does so by ejecting a strong stream of warm air out the back of the device, so be sure to follow the manual’s warning and not place it up against a wall or too close to other items.

Both the cooking containers are robust with tight fitting lids and function well as storage containers. Despite the added bulk of the legs and handles, they both fit onto the shelves of my half-size fridge and the 1.4l container nestled neatly into my small backpack, making them perfect for storing or transporting leftovers. I should note here that of the two containers, I found myself reaching for the 3.8l one most often. The 1.4l vessel is a little small in most cases, even when cooking for one.

As far as taking the Crispi itself on the go, the Power Pod and the smaller container both fit into my backpack and didn’t prove too heavy to carry around on their own. But alongside my laptop and the other bits and pieces I bring to work, I can’t say there was a lot of room for the Crispi.

Ninja Crispi 4-in-1 Portable Air Fryer review: How well does it cook?

While the format may be outwardly new, the Crispi’s most important function is still to cook food. So, how well does it measure up in that department?

I’ll start with its Keep Warm function. This aptly-named low-heat mode is designed to keep cooked food warm, in the case that something you’ve roasted or air fried isn’t quite ready to serve. I found this function worked well and served its purpose. It kept roasted cauliflower and sweet potato warm without drying them out while I was busy preparing a tahini dressing. This setting also proved a dab hand at heating pastries, if you fancy giving your shop-bought croissant an oven-fresh makeover.

Most air fryers worth their salt can thoroughly revivify a slice of pizza, so that’s the first item I chose to test the Crispi’s ReCrisp feature. As I would’ve expected, a few minutes on ReCrisp did the job, crisping up the pizza crust and melting the cheese.

My first attempt at doing some real cooking in the Ninja Crispi was using the Roast function to cook gnocchi and summer vegetables, a dish I’ve made in both my oven and other air fryers on various occasions. The Crispi took around half an hour to cook the gnocchi and get the veg nicely browned, performing about on par with my oven and other air fryers I’ve tested. I will say that giving your food a shake during cooking is a must with the Crispi if you want things to cook evenly. Even then, I found the Crispi’s powerful heat could be a little variable, with some of my vegetables taking on too much colour on top while others retained a little too much bite.

Next I moved on to the most classic of air fryer roasting challenges: cooking a whole chicken. While I was skeptical regarding the Crispi’s ability to roast an entire bird, the marketing and recipe guides suggested it was able to do it, so I went out and bought a small 1.2kg chicken. While I had to maneuver its legs and wings a little to get it to sit in the 3.8l dish, it did fit with a little room to spare in the end. My chicken cooked through with crispy skin in a mostly fuss-free 60 minutes, aside from following the guide’s instructions to flip the whole chicken halfway through – don’t attempt to do this with two spatulas as I did.

For the final battery of tests I used the Crispi’s air fryer mode. I started out small with oven classics like chicken nuggets and spring rolls, both of which cooked faster than the suggested oven cooking time and reached a good level of crispness, matching the performance of other air fryers I’ve tested. I also cooked some marinated tofu, which is my favourite thing to make in an air fryer. I air fried it for 15 minutes, then popped it straight from the Crispi into a curry. The tofu achieved a good crispness on the outside while staying bouncy and fluffy inside.

And, of course, you can’t write an air fryer review without cooking some chips, can you? So to round things out I cooked up some frozen fries in the Crispi, which took the 12 minutes suggested on the bag. The Crispi put in a solid performance in this final test, crisping up the chips nicely while keeping them fluffy inside, though once again I did find the browning a little bit uneven.

Ninja Crispi 4-in-1 Portable Air Fryer review: Should you buy it?

For the most part, this pint-sized oddball works smoothly and air fries as well as many of its more stationary rivals, though it can’t quite match similarly-priced competitors or other Ninja models in terms of features. However, with the Crispi’s glass cooking dishes doubling as serving dishes, this air fryer allows for easy storage, ideal for work lunches, speedy reheating of leftovers and even cooking on the go.

However, at a price of £180, the Crispi does give me pause. While the whole idea of using your air fryer’s base to serve, store and transport food does work in practice, it’s not really a routine I can see myself or the average person getting into. Now, if you’re the meal-prepping, desk-lunching, gym-before-work type, then maybe the Crispi is just the thing you never knew you needed. For everyone else, I would probably recommend spending your money on a roomier or more powerful air fryer that you can’t, admittedly, take with you on the tube.