Earlier this week, I visited Ninja’s pop-up Double Stack restaurant, which takes the form of a giant air fryer. The restaurant’s hook is that everything on the menu is cooked in a Ninja Double Stack air fryer.

(As I had to leave early and was sneaked out through the kitchen, I can confirm that the team of chefs were indeed cooking in a troupe of Double Stack air fryers.)

If that immediately sets off alarm bells, and you imagine that the menu would be made up of breaded chicken goujons, chips and the like, which go in frosty from the freezer and come out golden and crispy, it’s probably a sign that you’re not making the most of your air fryer.

Air fryers aren’t really fryers at all

The name ‘air fryer’ is really a bit of a marketing gimmick. And it worked, as the countertop cooker has become one of the most popular kitchen appliances around over the last few years.

But it has caused confusion as to what they really do. An air fryer is a mini convection oven – which means it uses circulating hot air to cook food, just like the fan setting on your oven. But unlike your oven, an air fryer has a compact, non-stick cooking space, so it’s easier to clean. And it’s much cheaper and faster to cook in, as you’re not heating up a giant cavern every time you want to eat.

Almost anything you can cook in your inbuilt oven, you can cook in an air fryer. Space is likely to be the key limiting factor. At the Ninja restaurant, the chef pointed out that you can even use your air fryer to bake bread from scratch. The appliance comes in handy for two stages: proving the dough, and then for the baking itself.

Air fryer recipes that go beyond beige

In an effort to broaden the appeal of the kitchen device, Ninja set the scene with Aperol cocktails garnished with a dehydrated orange slice – dehydrated, of course, in an air fryer. In our review of the Ninja Foodi Max Dual Zone air fryer, Lee Bell similarly used the cooker to dehydrate orange slices for his Negronis.

Then there was the food. We’ve reproduced the key recipes from the menu below, and you can cook them in whichever air fryer you own (even those that are not Ninja air fryers), although they’re optimised for the Double Stack, which has two stacked cooking areas (crisper plate and grill) in each drawer.

Canapés included stacked skins with sour cream, chive and chorizo crumb, Mexican salmon on hash brown with smashed avocado and blackened corn and tofu karaage on crispy sushi rice with air fried vegetables and sriracha mayo.

The main course was air fried crispy tenderstem broccoli and soba noodles with tahini satay sauce, chilli rayu marinated crispy chicken or aubergine, and tofu and cabbage gyoza.

Dessert was Double Stacked brookies with sweet seedy brittle and oat or traditional crème fraiche. And we can confirm that everything tasted as good as it looks.

In the UK, the Ninja Double Stack XL is available from Ninja, John Lewis, Argos, Currys and Amazon, among other retailers, and it’s priced at £269.99 except at Argos, where it costs a penny more.

In the US, you can buy the DoubleStack XL from Ninja and Amazon for $229.99.

Want to know how much space the Double Stack will save you before you buy? We have the answer.