It’s been a little over a decade since the air fryer blew a salty, convection-fueled gust of hot air into the culinary discourse. In that time the appliance has gone from what looked like a faddish blip to permanent small appliance status. Many home cooks even find it to be a replacement for a microwave, using it daily to revive the crispy glory in reheated pizza, turn out piles of almost-as-good-as-the-pub french fries, and to brilliantly cook tender, singed-edged cubes of eggplant or sweet potatoes.
And while most former skeptics have come around to recognizing that air fryers can be fun and effective to cook with, most have a problem with low volume, as in: The volume of food they can cook is low.
Not anymore, though, because there’s a new air fryer in town: the Typhur Dome.
What’s Different about the Typhur Dome?
I’ve tested more than 20 air fryers and the Typhur Dome looks nothing like any I’ve ever seen before—less like a mini R2-D2 and more like a countertop pizza oven. Its cooking basket is huge, over 50% bigger than the next largest one I’ve tried.
That cooking area gives Typhur a huge advantage over the air fryer field, because rather than a layer of one, maybe two servings of french fries—or slabs of tofu, chicken wings, fish filets, cubed eggplant, or green beans—you can fit a whopping four to six servings, all arranged comfortably in a single layer, with no crowding necessary. I even made a few 12-inch pizzas with a homemade, high-hydration pizza dough. While I wouldn’t call the Typhur Dome a pizza oven (it’s probably best used to cook frozen ones) my results weren’t bad at all for a countertop appliance that tops out at 450°.
The shape of its cooking basket also helps. It’s more like a drawer than a deep fryer basket, which is to say, it’s shallower, longer, wider. Typhur said that would allow it to cook food faster. I was skeptical of this claim, but my own tests validated it—it squarely beat the competition by at least a few minutes when making french fries, and cooked everything shockingly fast, from frozen fish sticks to blistered green beans. The shallower depth seems to allow the fan to blast hot air more economically, creating a shorter distance from the top of the machine to the food. And to this end, the Typher Dome doesn’t need a preheat unless you’re cooking larger proteins like steaks and salmon filets.
A few other things set it apart. First, it’s impossible not to notice how quiet the Typhur is, more a gentle hum than a nauseating drone. And with a peak temp of 450°, it has a 50° boost over most (but not all) other air fryers, and on its dehydrate feature (more on that below), it can reach as low as 140°. There’s an impressive range to cook with.
A final, game-changing point of distinction is its self-cleaning mode. If you’re familiar with air fryers, you know that because of the fan, grease, sauce, and all kinds of bits of debris tend to build up over time inside, especially around the heating element. With a self-cleaning feature, there’s an elbow-grease free option for eliminating all that grime. You’ll just need to activate the Typhur app, and in it, you can select a 1-hour standard clean, or a 2-hour deep clean. The self-clean function emits a similar smell to the self-clean feature of a home oven, and some Redditors report that their smoke detectors go off, but I don’t have an issue with the cleaning function on my oven and so neither of those issues are deal breakers to me.
How is the Typhur similar to other air fryers?
The Typhur Dome’s interface is among the easiest-to-navigate of any air fryer I’ve tested. And like most, it has a range of presets for certain foods (fries, wings, steak, bacon) and cooking modes (frozen food, air fry, roast, broil, toast, and dehydrate). The times and temperatures on every preset can also be manually adjusted.