Princess may not be a brand you recognise. It’s a Dutch firm that specialises in small kitchen and household appliances. As its name suggests, the Princess Digital Family Aerofryer has a capacity that’s large enough to cook for families and has digital, touchscreen controls that let you either choose from pre-programmed settings or that let you manually adjust the time or temperature.
It’s not a quiet air fryer, in fact it’s one of the loudest we’ve used, nor is it cheap. Its cooking skills are on, or above average compared to other similarly priced rivals, but its wide variety of options and settings and its simple design help to elevate its standing a little. However, it's not quite of the calibre we'd look for from our very best air fryers.
Price and availability
The Princess Digital Family Aerofryer is available now, priced at £89.99 (around $115 / AU$170). Though its combination of manual and digital controls, plus its large capacity, would lead you to think this is a bargain price, its inconsistent cooking results and noisy nature make it hard to recommend at this price.
Design
For an air fryer with such a large capacity, the Princess Digital Family Aerofryer is surprisingly compact. This, coupled with its combination of glossy and matte black finish and rounded shape gives it a sense of elegance, and this fryer would not look out of place in most kitchens.
Its circular digital screen sits above the sliding, removable baking tray and on this screen are icons representing its seven pre-programmed cooking settings, ranging from chips to chicken and cakes, or baked goods. There’s a thermometer icon for its temperature settings, which can be manually controlled up to 200-degrees Celsius via the plus and minus signs above and below this icon, and a clock icon with its own plus and minus buttons, used to manually control the timer up to an hour.
Despite having all the icons in one place, the Princess isn’t the easiest of air fryers to use. You have to first press a small M button and then use the same button to toggle through the programs. Once you’ve selected a setting, the fryer starts automatically. If you choose the wrong one, or realise you’d be better off manually setting the controls, you have to turn the fryer off and back on, and start again.
Performance
The Princess Digital Family Aerofryer didn’t disappoint us with its food, but it didn’t excite us either. Its chips, cooked on the pre-programmed chips setting, had a crispy skin but weren’t as fluffy on the inside as others we’ve tasted. We’ve since experimented with manually setting the fryer and found that chips cooked on a lower temperature for longer produced significantly better results. Similarly, chicken wings using the pre-programmed settings were a little dry on the inside, but had crispy, flavorful skin.
Having the pre-programmed settings acts as a useful guide, but we have often found it far easier to set the time and temperature manually each time, both because it is quicker to do so and it gives us more control over what we’re cooking. Cakes, in particular, won’t all fall under a single setting but it’s a useful starting point.
Verdict
If the Princess Digital Family Aerofryer was cheaper, its shortcomings would be a little easier to forgive. It’s an above average air fryer that makes above average food but not to the level we’d expect for £90. Having a range of pre-programmed settings will also help new users but they’re not worth the money alone, because you’ll soon realise that changing these settings for certain meals produces better results.
Pick this up if you can get it in the sales, or during Black Friday, but there are other, cheaper models in our best air fryer round up we feel are more deserving of your cash.
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