Designed like a traditional countertop toaster oven, this air fryer has a pull-down door instead of a drawer, wire racks instead of a basket, and a rotisserie spit and mesh drum, which adds a touch of novelty to roasting a whole chicken or cooking a batch of chips.
Design & appearance
In the box is a 10-litre oven, three wire trays, a mesh basket cylinder, a black drip tray, a rotisserie spit, a rotisserie handling fork, and the manual.
The oven itself is square with rounded corners, and stands 36cm high, with a depth of 30cm and width of 34cm. Neat, with not too large a footprint, the body is matt black and wipeable, while the door’s black glossy finish is almost a dark mirror. If you need to move it, it’s manageable at a weight of 9.58kg, but it’s not an appliance you want to be lifting in and out of a kitchen cupboard. It really needs a permanent countertop presence. The oven is controlled via a long touchscreen panel above the door, and it’s easy and intuitive to use. There are keys for power, the oven light, to increase or decrease the temperature and time, to turn on the spin function, and to start cooking.
There are also four pre-set functions (chips, chicken, vegetables, and steak) and three manual settings (air fry, bake and dehydrate). You simply pick a setting, then temperature and cooking time, much like a microwave. The three wire racks have a cooking surface of roughly 23cm by 20cm, which fits about twelve fish fingers. Theoretically, you could cook 36 at once – if you were hungry enough. The rotisserie spit is good for a 1.3kg whole chicken, the drum will fit 750g of chips. The drip tray has an effective non-stick finish that makes cleaning a breeze. The manual isn’t heavy on recipes. There are a few, along with a useful table of typical food cooking times, but if you want to experiment, you w’ll need to look elsewhere for inspiration. So how do you use it?
Performance
Before the first use, you’ll need to give the oven a wipe on the inside, wash the accessories, plug in the oven and choose the air fryer manual setting of 200°C for 15 minutes. The oven sounds like a very tiny jet engine taking off but after a while, you don’t really notice the noise. It heats to 200°C very quickly, and beeps when it reaches that temperature. Once 15 minutes is up, the oven beeps to signal it has finished, turns the heat off, and you are good to go. We went all-in with our first test: a 1.4kg marinaded whole chicken on the rotisserie spit. Breville says the limit is 1.3kg, but we got away with the extra lb. You’ll need to truss the chicken legs and wings to prevent anything dragging in the drip pan or brushing the top mesh. The chicken took an hour at 200°C and came out juicy, with crozzled skin.
There’s a knack to fitting both the rotisserie spit and mesh drum into the air fryer with the supplied fork. You need to learn how before you load the spit and drum with food, as the left side needs to engage properly within the slot before you lift the left-hand side onto the hook. Next, we did thin-cut French fries in the mesh drum. They took 25 minutes on 200°C for 700g and came out crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside.
We also made a nursery lunch for a toddler of two fish fingers and a small portion of chips. The meal took 15 minutes at 200°C on the air fry function, and the resulting food was crispy. But the real boon was that we didn’t need to heat an entire oven for a tiny meal, nor did we need to listen for a cooking timer and race to turn off the oven – because the air fryer switches itself off after cooking. Another plus point is that its countertop position means you can have worktop directly in front and at either side. We hadn’t realised just how convenient this kind of setup could be. After seven days, we were using the air fryer for pretty much all our regular cooking requirements aside from (obviously) sauces, gravies, small-cut vegetables, and some sautéing. Any dry food, from bacon and burgers to Chicken Kievs and Swedish meatballs, went into the air fryer, as did roast potatoes, baked potatoes and chips. You can also heat up tray-based ready meals using the bake function – and again, it’ll save electricity when compared to using a regular oven. We found cooking in the Halo to be incredibly convenient, probably because it has all the advantages of a convection oven with microwave timing functionality (you set it for 15 minutes, it cooks for 15 minutes and then switches off); it’s at worktop height; and it’s extremely easy to clean. You just wipe out the internal cabinet and the door, soak and wash the used racks and drip tray – and that’s it. It’s much faster than cleaning an oven and doesn’t require an eye-watering oven cleaner to do so. We also found the wire trays cooled down quickly after cooking, so they were fine to handle after serving up. There are a couple of things potential purchasers may want to bear in mind: it’s not clear how you’ll be able to replace the oven light, and you will need somewhere to store the mesh drum and spit when you aren’t using them.
Price and availability
The Halo Rotisserie Air Fryer has an RRP of around £160, but you should be able to buy it for around £136. It’s available from AO.com at this price, as well as Very, but the best price we found was from Appliances Direct, where it’s on sale for £132.97.
Verdict
The Halo Rotisserie Air Fryer is a cracking bit of kit if you have a substantially sized oven, maybe a range cooker, and don’t want to fire the whole thing up for a few fish fingers, or you want a DIY quick-cook solution for teenagers or distracted adults in your household that won’t risk burning the house down. It would also be a good option if you don’t have an oven or room for one, or you live in a house-share and you want a cooking facility in your own space. However, if you are a vegetarian or vegan, you may find the functionality does not give you the range you require for your dietary requirements. Still, we loved it. It’s a quick, easy stress-saver.
