Salter EK5876 Digital Air Fryer 6.5l review: A reliable, flexible mid-sized air fryer

In many ways, the Salter EK5876 Digital Air Fryer 6.5l could be thought of as a Goldilocks appliance. It’s not so big that you won’t use its full capacity, but not so small as to leave you short on space. It’s not too pricey, but not so cheap as to question its quality. It has enough presets to give plenty of cooking flexibility, but not so many that it verges on overwhelming.

In essence, if you’re looking for a mid-sized air fryer – one that’s suitable for a small family, a couple or even a solo household; one that performs well when cooking most foods – this one could be “just right”.

Salter EK5876 Digital Air Fryer 6.5l review: What do you get for the money?

For what it offers, Salter’s EK5876 Digital Air Fryer 6.5l is surprisingly good value, especially when compared to similar models. It’s certainly more affordable than larger oven-style air fryers, such as the Tefal Easy Fry 10-in-1, twin drawer models, such as Ninja’s Foodi Dual Zone AF300UK and it’s even cheaper than some more compact air fryers, such as Zwilling. It has a generous 6.5 litres of cooking space in its drawer, and a removable low, flat, non-stick cooking tray (measuring 21.5 x 23cm), meaning that you can squeeze in four chicken quarters or breasts, around 750g of potato wedges or four quarter pounder burgers. But don’t worry, as the included recipe booklet and guide to times and temperatures will give you a handy starting point for working out what you can cook.

The air fryer itself isn’t too bulky – 28.4 x 37.2 x 32.3cm (WDH) – enabling it to live at the back of a worktop, below the wall units, when not in use. Nor is it especially heavy at 6.2kg, so you could feasibly move it around the kitchen without much hassle if counter space is an issue.

Overall, the design is sleek, finished in glossy black with a metal panel below the controls and a coordinated metallic flourish on the drawer’s handle. As the controls are all operated by a touchscreen, there are no buttons or visible icons when it’s not in operation. When it’s on, there’s a menu button that scrolls through its 10 presets – including steak, pork, pizza, sausage, bake and chips – a button for manual cooking, and one to toggle between time (up to 60 minutes) and temperature (50-200°C) settings, as well as the plus and minus buttons to adjust them. Helpfully, time and temperature can both be altered while the air fryer is cooking. The control panel also features a pair of illuminated icons: one to show that the air fryer is heating and the other to show that the fan is in action; however, given the countdown display and the sound of the air fryer cooking, these icons seem a tad redundant.

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Salter EK5876 Digital Air Fryer 6.5l review: What’s good about it?

One of the most appealing aspects of the Salter EK5876 is the range of presets. They cover most family favourites – everything from veggies and chips to chicken and fish – meaning you may only need to hit three buttons to get midweek dinner started. There’s also plenty of power (1,600W) to heat up quickly, so you won’t be waiting ages for dinner to finish, but it’s not especially pricey to run over a long period: in tests, an hour at 200°C consumed 0.651 kWh of electricity which, at a rate of 29p per unit, would only cost around 18p.

The Salter EK5876 cooks well and, if there wasn’t already a preset for what I was making, there were suggested cooking temperatures and times for many foods in the included recipe booklet. For example, when I was cooking hash browns from frozen, there was no preset for frozen food for me to use but there was a suggested time of 15 minutes at 200°C in the booklet. While it wasn’t clear if this was for hash browns specifically, after three minutes of preheating it was perfectly adequate and the hash browns emerged golden brown and crispy at the corners, although they were a touch softer underneath and could have benefitted from being turned over midway through.

The preset for chips – 15 minutes at 200°C – isn’t quite long enough for making chips from scratch, and may be better suited to partially cooked fries or those from the freezer. I used the same temperature but adjusted the time to 23 minutes to cook freshly chipped potatoes that had been soaked, rinsed, patted dry and tossed in a small amount of oil. Having shaken the drawer several times during cooking, the chips were fairly uniformly cooked, though some of the smaller pieces were crisp at the ends and well-browned, while larger chips were still golden overall but softer.

Although there’s a good amount of flat space inside the Salter EK5876’s drawer, cooking larger amounts can be a bit of a squeeze. Some air fryers, such as Tefal’s Easy Fry 10-in-1 or its Dual Air Fryer & Grill, can fit in a whole chicken, yet I struggled to fit four chicken legs into the Salter EK5876, even when overlapping. That said, they were still thoroughly cooked after adjusting the chicken preset from 20 to 28 minutes.

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Salter EK5876 Digital Air Fryer 6.5l review: What could be better?

The biggest bugbear I had when using the EK5876 is that around 3-5 minutes of preheating is required, even essential, when cooking from cold. In effect, this means that you have to adjust any preset to include preheating time or wait to add food. Ideally, there would be a specific preheat button, or an alert to let you know it’s hot enough to cook. I also felt that a preset for reheating food was missing from its range of functions, as it’s something I think most people would find handy.

Additionally, while I liked that there was a preset pizza button, the amount of flat space inside limits its usefulness: you could perhaps fit a 10-inch pizza, but a smaller 9-inch pizza would be easier to get in and out. You also won’t be able to use this air fryer to dehydrate fruit or meat – something that’s offered by other air fryers, such as Tower’s T17039 5-in-1. The EK5876’s temperature can be set as low as 50°C, which is suitable for dehydration, however the maximum one hour run time means that you’d have to keep restarting the programme to get the several hours required for dehydration.

Setting the Salter EK5876 is simple overall, but it does have a potentially frustrating quirk in that the time and temperature displays cycle by themselves. This can mean, for example, if you’re setting the time and you pause to think, the display changes so you’re adjusting the temperature instead.

Finally, while its size and capabilities make this a great buy for families, it doesn’t appear to be dishwasher-safe, so you’ll have to dedicate time to cleaning the drawer and the tray by hand. The cooking tray has a non-stick coating, which makes this easier, but it would still be a chore for those whose busy lifestyles mean they rely on a dishwasher.

Salter EK5876 Digital Air Fryer 6.5l review: Should you buy it?

The Salter EK5876 Digital Air Fryer isn’t the most hi-tech air fryer you can buy, nor does it offer every function that some air fryers can. Still, what it does, it does well: it gives a solid cooking performance with enough space for most, if not all, foods, and has a useful range of presets, all at a price point that’s affordable.

It’s a good fit for a small family, or household on a budget, and it could help save money on energy bills if you’re not routinely cooking enough food to fill an oven. In an ideal world, it would be robust enough to withstand dishwasher cleaning but, given all its other pluses, that’s a minor quibble. 

However, if you want an air fryer with fewer quibbles still, and one that doesn’t need to be cleaned by hand, you might want to turn your attention to the pricier wonder that is the Ninja Air Fryer Max Pro 6.2l AF180UK. And even better, that one’s dishwasher safe.