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It’s been a little over a decade since the air fryer blew a salty, convection-fueled gust of hot air into the culinary discourse. In that time the appliance has gone from what looked like a faddish blip to permanent small appliance status. Many home cooks even find it to be a replacement for a microwave, using it daily to revive the crispy glory in reheated pizza, turn out piles of almost-as-good-as-the-pub french fries, and to brilliantly cook tender, singed-edged cubes of eggplant or sweet potatoes.
And while most former skeptics have come around to recognizing that air fryers can be fun and effective to cook with, most have a problem with low volume, as in: The volume of food they can cook is low.
Not anymore, though, because there’s a new air fryer in town: the Typhur Dome.
What’s Different about the Typhur Dome?
I’ve tested more than 20 air fryers and the Typhur Dome looks nothing like any I’ve ever seen before—less like a mini R2-D2 and more like a countertop pizza oven. Its cooking basket is huge, over 50% bigger than the next largest one I’ve tried.
That cooking area gives Typhur a huge advantage over the air fryer field, because rather than a layer of one, maybe two servings of french fries—or slabs of tofu, chicken wings, fish filets, cubed eggplant, or green beans—you can fit a whopping four to six servings, all arranged comfortably in a single layer, with no crowding necessary. I even made a few 12-inch pizzas with a homemade, high-hydration pizza dough. While I wouldn’t call the Typhur Dome a pizza oven (it’s probably best used to cook frozen ones) my results weren’t bad at all for a countertop appliance that tops out at 450°.
The shape of its cooking basket also helps. It’s more like a drawer than a deep fryer basket, which is to say, it’s shallower, longer, wider. Typhur said that would allow it to cook food faster. I was skeptical of this claim, but my own tests validated it—it squarely beat the competition by at least a few minutes when making french fries, and cooked everything shockingly fast, from frozen fish sticks to blistered green beans. The shallower depth seems to allow the fan to blast hot air more economically, creating a shorter distance from the top of the machine to the food. And to this end, the Typher Dome doesn’t need a preheat unless you’re cooking larger proteins like steaks and salmon filets.
A few other things set it apart. First, it’s impossible not to notice how quiet the Typhur is, more a gentle hum than a nauseating drone. And with a peak temp of 450°, it has a 50° boost over most (but not all) other air fryers, and on its dehydrate feature (more on that below), it can reach as low as 140°. There’s an impressive range to cook with.
A final, game-changing point of distinction is its self-cleaning mode. If you’re familiar with air fryers, you know that because of the fan, grease, sauce, and all kinds of bits of debris tend to build up over time inside, especially around the heating element. With a self-cleaning feature, there’s an elbow-grease free option for eliminating all that grime. You’ll just need to activate the Typhur app, and in it, you can select a 1-hour standard clean, or a 2-hour deep clean. The self-clean function emits a similar smell to the self-clean feature of a home oven, and some Redditors report that their smoke detectors go off, but I don’t have an issue with the cleaning function on my oven and so neither of those issues are deal breakers to me.
How is the Typhur similar to other air fryers?
The Typhur Dome’s interface is among the easiest-to-navigate of any air fryer I’ve tested. And like most, it has a range of presets for certain foods (fries, wings, steak, bacon) and cooking modes (frozen food, air fry, roast, broil, toast, and dehydrate). The times and temperatures on every preset can also be manually adjusted.
And while the Typhur has introduced some of innovations in how it works, the core mechanism is the same: It’s essentially a countertop convection oven, utilizing a heating implement and a fan in the upper part of the appliance, which fills its chamber with hot air as it operates, cooking the food inside.
Its cooking basket is lined with a ceramic nonstick coating, which some other models use in favor of Teflon coatings. The basket is advertised as being dishwasher safe, but as always, we don’t recommend putting any nonstick cooking tools, regardless of the type of coating they have, in the dishwasher. It can damage the coating over time. (And as with a nonstick skillet, you’ll want to avoid using sharp metal tongs or spatulas when reaching into the basket, which might scratch things up.)
How Big Is the Typhur Dome?
If you’re looking for a compact air fryer, this isn’t it. It measures about 14 inches wide by 19 inches deep by 10 inches tall and weighs just over 20 pounds. You won’t want to have to move in and out of a cupboard or closet very often.
Why Does the Size and Shape of the Typhur Cooking Basket Matter?
Unlike a deep fryer, in which submerged food develops crispiness through direct contact with hot oil, food cooked in an air fryer needs exposure to the hot air inside the machine. And because that food isn’t floating around (as it would in oil), it needs to be spread out in an even layer. It’s the same principle as roasting in the oven—a crowded mound of cubed vegetables on a sheet pan will steam rather than crisp.
So while many air fryers are deep, with cooking baskets that resemble traditional deep fryer ones, that depth isn’t actually so useful. Surface area is what’s important, so that the hot air can easily envelop whatever it is you’re cooking. The Typhur Dome’s cooking basket is designed for this, with its shallow, but wide and deep, design.
Some air fry aficionados may find its shallowness limiting, because it can’t fit foods any taller than about two inches, which rules out something like a whole chicken. But for most cooking, it won’t be a problem.
What Else Can You Do with the Typhur Dome Besides Air-Fry?
One feature that some other air fryers claim to have but don’t utilize particularly well is a dehydrate function, simply because with the small surface area of a typical air-fryer cooking basket, you’d only be able to dehydrate a couple bites of food at a time.
But because of how much room there is to arrange sliced fruits or vegetables (or meat, to make jerky), the dehydrate feature is actually pretty handy. The preset temperature is 140° and it can be programmed to run for up to 24 hours.
It works best for heavier foods, though. The fan blows lighter ones all over.I tried drying some thyme in it and it made a mess (same thing for toasting sliced almonds). But for fruit, hardier vegetables, and anything heavy enough to stay put, it’s a terrific, albeit secondary feature.
Should You Buy a Typhur Dome?
At $499, the Typhur Dome is pricey by air fryer standards (for something cheaper I also like this one from Instant that costs more than $350 less). But no other air fryer out there can do everything it can. With its size, fast cooking times, and a few extra features that are actually useful (like self-clean and dehydrate functions), the Typhur Dome is an appliance upgrade for people who don’t want to think of their air fryer as a gimmicky little toy, but as an appliance that they rely on day in and day out. It might be the thing that gives the microwave a run for its money.