Philips Series 3000 Dual Basket Air Fryer review – including ...
Philips Series 3000 Dual Basket AirFryer | £99.99 | Tester: Sally FitzGerald
A dual basket air fryer with a combined 9ltr capacity, the Philips Series 3000 promises crisp, tender, evenly cooked food every time. The RRP is £17.99, but for Black Friday you can get it for just £99.99 for the black handle model
Designed to give the Ninja a run for its money, the Philips Series 3000 Dual Basket Air Fryer features two drawers which can be synced, a stylish casing and Rapid Plus Air Technology. But should it be your next air fryer purchase? We put it through its paces to find out…
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Over the last few years we’ve tested a lot of different air fryers so we could come up with our round-up of the best air fryers for 2024, from ones like the Cosori TurboBlaze 6-litre which is ideal for couples, to the original Ninja Foodie Dual Zone which could be credited with really supercharging the whole air fryer craze.
One thing we can definitely say is that technology has come a long way with air fryers, and you can now get a really good fryer for a much cheaper price. And contrary to some beliefs, they’re not a fad either – the air fryer is definitely here to stay in our kitchens.
From the early days of Ninja leading the way, many other brands have now developed their own rival machines, and the Philips Series 3000 Dual Basket Air Fryer definitely meets a lot of the criteria first set out by the Ninja. But is it worth your investment? Here’s what we think…
Pros Cooks really evenly and in a good amount of time Cooks amazing homemade chips Quiet fan Easy to clean and features a really nice basket in the large drawer Competitive price, particularly if there’s an offer on like this Black Friday one Plenty of room to cook food for a family of 4 Looks stylish in the kitchen Responsive control panel Cons Quite large, so you need a decent size kitchen The alarm is quite quiet so you don’t always hear it Fingerprints show up on the outside easily The instructions are basic, and only online, so not ideal for anyone who wants a paper version No recipes to get you started Technical detailsDimensions:382.5 x 443.9 x 314.2 mm
Capacity: 9 litres
Functions: Air frying (8 presets)
Temperature range: 40–200°C
Time control: up to 60 minutes
Where to buy: the RRP of this air fryer is £179.99, but for Black Friday Amazon is offering it 44% off, for just £99.99
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The Philips Series 3000 Dual Basket Air Fryer boasts two spacious drawers that can sync the timings of your food so both drawers are ready at once. Photo © Vegan Food & Living
I’m going to be honest here, if you’ve never used an air fryer before, you may be disappointed with the limited instructions that this air fryer comes with, and find yourself having to go with a bit of a trial and error approach.
When I first got the fryer out of the box, I noticed how thin the instruction manual was. Just the very basics are covered here. However there is a QR code which takes you to an online manual which at least covers a little more about setting up the fryer and using the presets.
As usual, the first step is to give the drawers and crisp plate/basket a wash. Then for this machine you need to clip in place a little plastic guard at the back of the machine, which prevents it from getting too close to the wall, so making sure you’re giving the air fryer enough room for the air to circulate. I thought this was a nice touch.
You’ll next discover that although the gorgeous matte grey casing to the air fryer looks incredible sleek in your kitchen, it is a bit of a nightmare for showing up fingerprints. I was constantly fighting a losing battle with wipe them off and adding new ones.
As soon as you get to using the machine though, any slight downsides are outweighed by the functionality.
Exploring the settingsThere are eight presets for things like homemade chips, frozen food, baking etc, and then the ability to alter both the time and temperature to set your own.
Because this is dual drawer, you need to select the drawer you want to use first, then set the preset/time/temperature for that drawer. You can either copy the settings for the second drawer, set new ones and sync so that everything finishes at the same time, or just ignore the second drawer altogether!
The smaller drawer has a 3 litre capacity, and the larger drawer a 6 litre capacity, so it means that altogether you can fit quite a lot of food into this fryer.
Philip’s Rapid Plus Air Technology also means that air circulates really well to give a lovely crisp finish to your food.
So once we were all set up, as usual we tested three different types of food in the fryer to see what the results were.
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This air fryer cooked some of the best homemade chips of any air fryer we've tested. Photo © Vegan Food & Living
As air fryers became famous for their ability to cook chips without needing much oil, this is always our first test in any air fryer.
The online manual advised us to cut the potatoes into chunky chips, soak them in water for 30 minutes to remove excess starch and then drain and pat dry with kitchen towel. After this, we returned the chips to the bowl, added 1 tbsp oil and tossed the chips thoroughly so they were very lightly coated.
After this, it was just a case of emptying them into a drawer – we used the large drawer which comfortably held two large potatoes-worth of chips with space to spare – setting the preset timer on the homemade chip function, and pressing go.
The shake alarm went off twice for this setting, once at 16 minutes left to go, and a second time at 8 minutes left.
This was then I first realised that the beep is quite quiet. It’s fine if you’re in the same room and don’t have anything like the radio on, but if you’re in a different room or it’s really noisy, you may struggle a bit more to hear it.
The beep does continue for about 30 seconds, so that gives it more chance of getting your attention.
When you remove the drawer to shake the contents it pauses all the settings for that drawer, but if you’ve got anything frying in the second drawer, that will keep going.
How did the finished chips taste?Nothing short of impressive.
The preset function took the chips from raw to perfectly cooked in 32 minutes. They were beautifully fluffy on the inside and had a good level of crisp on the outside, and most impressively were very evenly cooked.
I’ve made a lot of chips in air fryers by this point, and this one gave some of the best results I’ve ever experienced.
A pack of six vegan sausages comfortably fitted into the small drawer of the Philips 3000 Dual Basket air fryer. Photo © Vegan Food & Living
Our second air fryer test tends to be a mock meat to see if it cooks evenly.
For this one, we involved the trusty vegan sausage. We wanted to cook them at the same time as the chips, and as the packet only contained six sausages, this fitted perfectly into the smaller air fryer basket.
As you can see in the photo above, six sausages still allowed for plenty of room around each sausage, so even the 3 litre drawer is a decent size.
I skipped the preset this time, and just followed the packet cooking instructions, shaving off a couple of minutes from the time as I know air fryers cook quicker.
I did shake the basket around halfway through cooking, but could already see that this wasn’t really necessary because the sausages were cooking very evenly, with the bottoms colouring just as much as the tops. The Rapid Air Technology clearly works.
When I took the sausages out at the alloted time they were perfectly cooked, and indeed probably could have done with a minute or two less if anything.
This shows that although this air fryer doesn’t knock huge amounts off the cooking time as some air fryers promise, it does save a bit of time and a lot of energy compared to a conventional oven.
Although it doesn't have a dehydrator setting, the Philips 3000 Dual Basket Air Fryer still produced tasty apple crisps. Photo © Vegan Food & Living
Our final air fryer test is always something sweet, thanks to the surprising ability of an air fryer to bake really well, which isn’t something you’d automatically expect.
A lot of air fryers these days boast to act as a dehydrator too, something that can be quite useful for vegan cooking. Now the Philips Series 3000 model doesn’t promote this as one of its functions, so I was interested to see how well it coped with baking something like apple crisps, which are a fantastically easy and healthy snack you can use an air fryer to whip up.
First I cut an apple into around 5mm-thick slices and then cut out the core.
Getting the thickness right is key with apple crisps. Too thin and they’re prone to go flying around your air fryer. Too thick and they’ll take ages to dry out.
I also sprinkled them with a light dusting of cinnamon as this makes them taste even better.
Because the fryer didn’t have a dehydrator setting, the process did involve a bit of trial and error with the temperature and timings. I found 150°C was too low – it would have got there eventually, but the bonus of air frying rather than actually dehydrating is the speed – and 175°C started to burn the apple. So I found 165°C was about the sweet spot, and it took around 20 minutes to get these to the right level of crisp.
Importantly though it worked, and once I’d left the apple to cool down and crisp up even more I had a really delicious snack.
As with most air fryers, the Philips Series 3000 model isn’t perfect.
The instructions leave a lot to be desired, fingerprints can easily be seen on the surface of the fryer meaning you having to keep clean it, the beep of the alarm is a little too quiet, and there’s no doubt about it that it makes its sizeable presence known on your kitchen worktop.
But would I buy one?
It’s a simple answer. Yes.
Despite all of the above downsides, the fact remains that the functionality of the Philips Series 3000 Dual Basket Air Fryer is brilliant. The simple but oh so important deciding factor is that it cooks the food fantastically.
As I said before, it produced some of the crispiest, most evenly cooked handmade chips that I’ve ever tried in an air fryer, and I only needed 1 tbsp oil to do so.
It cooked the sausages evenly and thoroughly in less time than it would take in a conventional oven, and it made beautifully crispy apple crisps once I got the temperature right.
The size means that it’s much better suited to a family of four than to a couple, and that that family of four also has to have a decent space on the work surface to accomodate it, but if you fulfill both of these criteria then I really do think you’ll love it.
We thoroughly test each air fryer in order to write an informed, useful review that you can trust.
To do this, we follow the same process for every air fryer that we review.
First we unpack the box, look at what you get with the air fryer, and then follow the instructions that come with each specific air fryer to set it up.
The important thing for any air fryer is how it cooks food though, so we test each one at least three times. Firstly to cook homemade chips, then to cook a mock meat, and thirdly to either cook a baked item, or to test the frying ability, depending on the capabilities.
We judge the air fryers on how well they cook the food, how crisp the finish is, how long food takes to cook, how easy the machine is to use, how easy is it to clean, and how many extra capabilities/functions it has.
Each air fryer is then given a score out of 5, and rated on what purpose it is best suited to.
Want to put another air fryer to the test? Check out our guide to the best air fryers on the market
