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You should know that the person writing this Midea air fryer review is not exactly an "air fryer person." It's not because I’m too fancy for them—I love crispy fries and chicken tenders as much as the next person—I just think they are often more complicated than they should be.
Air fryers are appliances marketed toward novice cooks, and with a few exceptions, like Breville’s Joule oven, they are just little ovens with built-in convection fans. They shouldn’t ask you to set more than time and temperature. However, most come with a whole range of preset functions that are supposed to make cooking easier, but actually make it more difficult because they make you rely on a specialized recipe book or cooking guidelines.
Midea’s two-zone air fryer has those presets, but also has a somewhat novel design, so I unboxed it with an open mind. If you’ve heard of Midea, it’s probably for their immensely popular, whisper quiet, window air conditioning units. You can’t take a step down a Brooklyn street without passing beneath one of them. I live with one myself and can attest that they live up to the hype they get from review sites around the web.
However, I refused to let my appreciation for the brand’s air conditioner cloud my judgment about its other products. I cooked fries, tenders, burgers, cookies, a whole chicken, and more in Midea’s air fryer to see what this machine could do.
The Midea Two-Zone Air Fryer Oven is a hybrid of the two main air fryer styles. The top is a basket style air fryer while the bottom is a toaster oven air fryer. This allows you to cook two different batches of food simultaneously. It’s not the first dual-zone air fryer; there are others like this one from Ninja. But it’s the first one anybody on our staff has seen that combines bucket and toaster oven styles together.
Another feature of this air fryer is its sync ability, which calibrates the cook times of the top and bottom zones so that they finish at the same time. For example, If your fries on top are set to cook for 15 minutes and your chicken nuggets are on the bottom for 25, the Midea will wait to cook the fries until the nuggets reach the 15 minute mark. Beyond these features though, the machine is very similar to other air fryers on the market in terms of its functions and capabilities.
This is definitely one of the quietest air fryers I’ve ever used—some air fryers sound like miniature jet engines. As demonstrated by their famously quiet AC, Midea’s engineers are skilled at making a quiet appliance. But quietness alone wasn’t going to win me over.
This Midea air fryer oven has 8 settings: air fry, grill, dehydrate, bake, roast, broil, reheat, and toast. That sounds impressive, but the instructions don’t provide a clear explanation of what these settings actually do. In my experience testing other air fryers and multi cookers, these settings usually correspond to a change in which heating elements are activated at what strength and whether or not the convection fan is on (roast, for example, tends to place most of the power in the lower heating element). However, when I played around with these settings, there didn’t seem to be much of a difference beyond the preset temperature and time range allowed by the machine.
Grill was especially absurd because obviously there’s no real “grilling” going on in there, it’s just an oven. It also struggled to successfully cook burgers. I tried in both the top and bottom zones and it just wasn’t happening. The cooking guidelines say to cook burgers on the grill setting at 350℉ degrees. But the temperature range for the grill setting is 400-450℉. Because burgers are typically grilled over higher heat, I thought the instructions might have had a copy mistake, so I cooked them 450℉. Each time the burgers were brown on the edges and fully raw in the middle of the patty. Even with further tinkering the results were inconsistently cooked.
I also found the two-zone feature that makes this air fryer so unique, underwhelming. The lower oven is very compact, and I had a hard time sliding things in and out of it, as there is very little space between the tray and the walls of the machine that left me feeling like I was constantly at risk of burning my knuckles. On certain settings like air fry, the machine cues you to toss the ingredients half way through the cooking cycle. With the basket, all you have to do is give it a little shake, but with the oven, you have to gingerly flip things around on the teeny cooking tray. I made fries in both chambers, and the fries in the basket were significantly better than the fries made in the oven, mostly because I found flipping the fries in the lower compartment tedious. Though making cookies or miniature pizzas made more sense, and worked much better, in the oven than in the basket.
The basket was the more versatile cooking zone. To my surprise—and the surprise of everyone in the test kitchen—I roasted a beautiful chicken in it. I had to look up a recipe online for air fryer roast chicken because, despite stamping its chicken cooking prowess on the box, the guidelines for the Midea didn’t actually specify what to do for a whole chicken. After 50 mins at 375℉ on the roast setting—with frequent turning and checking for doneness—the resulting bird was a juicy, succulent and tender masterpiece. Frankly, it was better than any roast chicken I've ever made in the oven.
If you don’t mind learning all its idiosyncrasies, you might like having the option of a basket style air fryer and a (quite small) oven in one. But if you’re buying your first air fryer, I recommend a simpler version, like the Ninja Air Fryer Max XL, much loved by my coworker Tiffany or the petite Cosori Lite that won our test for the best small air fryer.
