One Minute Review
The Ninja Foodi Max is a great buy for those days when you crave home-cooked food, but can’t be bothered to actually cook at home. It features nine cooking functions on board its easy-to-navigate body that lets you roast, bake, grill and crisp foods and more with ease, saving you time and energy in the process. It's one of the best Instant Pot alternatives we've tested.
The Ninja Foodi MAX 7.5L Multi-Cooker OP500UK (to give it its full name) can in fact pressure cook meals up to 70% faster than traditional cooking methods, and air fry with up to 75% less fat than traditional methods. Its whopping 7.5 litre capacity makes it a great option for large families, but you will however need the countertop room or ample storage space to house it.
Ninja Foodi Max Multi-Cooker price and availability
The Ninja Foodi Max 7.5L Multi-Cooker OP500UK is the largest multi-cooker in the Ninja family, and is currently on sale direct on Amazon and over on the Ninja website for £199.99 ($259 / AUS $361). The 6-litre Ninja Foodi 7-in-1 Multi-Cooker OP300UK version also usually retails for £199.99, showing the litre-to-price saving that can be made here..
A popular design in the multi-cooker space, you’ll also find the Ninja Foodi Max Multi-Cooker OP500UK available to buy at all the regular appliance haunts, from Best Buy in the US to John Lewis in the UK.
Design
- Capacity to cook for up to 6 people
- One-pot versatility
- Pressure cooks 70% faster than traditional cooking methods
The Ninja Foodi Max is Ninja’s largest multi-cooker to date and a step up from its 4.7 and 6L versions. At first glance, the Ninja can seem quite imposing – at 42cm high, 38cm wide and 11.3kg it isn’t the kind of appliance that will blend into the background, but more an appliance that is designed to be a key part of your kitchen and its ‘working triangle’. That is unless you have a separate pantry to hide away the large countertop appliances.
Its curvaceous black and stainless steel body is however stylishly realised. On board you’ll find an easy-to-navigate digital display featuring all the cooking options that can be actioned with a simple press of a button. With so many cooking functions to choose from including pressure cook, steam, grill, air crisp with no oil, bake, roast and dehydrate, it can make your traditional built-in oven seem rather redundant. As well as a cook and crisp basket, there’s a two-tier reversible rack to cook mains and sides simultaneously, which is good for layering vegetables with meats, poultry or fish.
The design’s 7.5 litre cooking pot and 4.7 litre cook and crisp basket is easy to clean – it comes with ceramic-coated, non-stick, dishwasher safe parts, but after use we simply washed the cooking pots in warm soapy water and gave the rest of the machine a wipe down with a damp cloth.
Performance
Set up of the Ninja Foodi Max Multi-Cooker is simple: plug in straight out of the box and you’re good to get cooking. The digital control panel is also very simple to follow and switches between the main features in one press of the button – choose from pressure cook, air fry, slow cook, steam, bake/roast, sear/sauté, grill, yoghurt and dehydrate.
It comes with TenderCrisp Technology that will crisps foods once cooked, for that authentic oven-cooked taste. While it does come with an instruction manual, we intuitively had a play and were able to work out how to use it within seconds. When you choose a preset cooking option it will suggest the most common temperature you’d need and give you a time for that function, which make life easier than having refer to the manual.
To find out how well it can cook a chicken and to discover if the TenderCrisp Technology lives up to its promise, we popped a raw medium-sized chicken into the pot and pressed the roast function. We topped it with oil and seasoned it and left it to run for the suggested time of 30 minutes on 180 degrees. If at the end of the 30 minutes you think the chicken still needs more time, it’s easy to add more time manually – in our test however the chicken looked ready to eat. The results were impressive as it didn’t just roast the chicken but left it incredibly tender, retaining moisture on the inside and crisping on the outside.
We were also curious to see how well the dehydration setting works on fresh ingredients so we chopped up bananas and placed them in the pot. While the results were as tasty as store bought banana chips, it did take us up to six hours on the suggested 60 degrees to make them as the machine slowly sucked the life out of the bananas and then crisped.
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