Midea Dual Zone Air Fryer review

Are you in the market for a new air fryer? Trying to find the right time to jump into the air frying world? Well then I may have just the product for you! Or…maybe not.

Midea was kind enough to send out a review sample of their Dual Zone Air Fryer, though this review is not sponsored. So let’s get into this review of the Midea Dual Zone Air Fryer!

Midea Dual Zone Air Fryer

The Midea Dual Zone Air Fryer boasts a hefty 11-quart capacity across two zones with the upper zone being 6-quart, and the lower being 5-quart. Both of these zones function entirely independent of each other, so you can cook a few different things at a time at different temperatures. This allows users to cut down on both cook time and cleanup time with less dishes to clean and less to keep track of while you’re cooking.

I have to say this is my favorite part about the air fryer, and really….that’s about it. Well, that and the front windows and the lights that let you watch your food while it’s cooking.

Unfortunately, I think the Midea Dual Zone Air Fryer is a victim of its own features, in that there are way too many of them and a majority of said features are of little use to the average consumer.

Feature Fryer

For example, there are 8 functions: air fry, grill, dehydrate, bake, roast, broil, reheat, and toast. All of these functions work on both the upper and lower zones. The problem for me isn’t necessarily the amount of functions, but that the functions I want to use don’t really work the way I want them to.

The air fry function doesn’t get hotter than 390 Fahrenheit, which leaves me with disappointing, less-than-crispy chicken nuggets. In order to reach above that temperature limit, I have to choose the grill option, which doesn’t really seem to make a whole lot of sense.

On top of that, the only way to switch to the different cooking modes is to turn the knob on top of the fryer; a knob that is pretty unresponsive, in my opinion. Half the time it doesn’t register when you’re turning the knob, so it won’t go to the next option and if you accidentally skip an option it’s a pain to get back to it.

Smart Fryer

The other big “feature” on this air fryer is that it’s a “smart air fryer” which means you can download an app to connect your air fryer to your Wi-Fi and have it do various things.

I’m already not too keen on the whole “everything needs to be internet-connected” movement, but I wanted to go into this with an open mind to see if it provided any genuinely helpful utility. Lo and behold…it does not.

You can start the air fryer, turn the lights on and off, and monitor the fryer’s cook-time from the app and that’s it. It is genuinely more work to open the app and do those things than it is to just walk over to your air fryer and do it yourself.

This is absolutely nothing more than a marketing gimmick designed to offer a price justification. I hate it so much.

Overall

I don’t completely hate the Midea Dual Zone Air Fryer, I really don’t. At the end of the day it does the job that it’s designed to do, and that’s really all I can ask for. But it does leave me longing for the simplicity of my old air fryer.

At $200 retail ($130 on sale for the holidays), this is a really hard sell for me, and I just don’t think I can recommend it at all. Best Buy has a dual zone air fryer for $40 right now ($100 retail), I would just go buy that if you really need one.