Once you purchase by our hyperlinks, Insider might earn an affiliate fee. Study extra.
- The Ninja Foodi is a brilliant widespread all-in-one equipment that rivals the Immediate Pot.
- Ninja simply added an indoor grill to its Foodi line: the Ninja Foodi Good XL Professional Grill.
- Not solely is it nice for smokeless grilling indoors, but it surely additionally air fries, dehydrates, broils, and griddles.
In my family, we’ll sometimes fireplace up the surface grill, however whereas I like the flavour it produces, I dislike the maintenance. And within the winter, I yearn for a method to put together juicy rooster with lovely grill marks with out freezing my butt off within the frigid Canadian chilly.
Enter the Ninja Foodi Good XL Professional Grill: an indoor, electric-powered grill and griddle that claims to provide the identical deep char as a conventional fuel grill (and air fry and dehydrate, besides).
After utilizing the Ninja Foodi Professional Grill for nearly two months now, I am fairly assured that my time on the out of doors grill might quickly see its finish. I am able to grill year-round with this helpful kitchen gadget.
Design
The very first thing I observed when unpacking the Ninja grill is how huge it’s. The cumbersome unit has an oblong base and a dome-shaped prime and offers 12 inches of cooktop area. It has seven cooking features, together with:
- Grilling
- Air frying
- BBQ griddling
- Baking
- Roasting
- Dehydrating
- Broiling
The intuitive management panel incorporates a backlit show, a dial, and several other buttons to customise your cooking expertise.
The grill additionally comes with a sensible thermometer you should use to trace the temperature of your meals because it cooks. It nestles into the facet of the grill when not in use.
The system additionally comes with just a few equipment, together with a crisper basket for air frying, a flat-top griddle, and a grill grate. The grill grate clicks proper into the unit base and heats up extremely rapidly. The opposite two equipment are designed to sit down on prime of the grill grates. All of the the equipment are dishwasher secure.
Cooking with the grill
Arguably the most effective function of this grill is the Good Cook dinner System. I am a reasonably good cook dinner, however I hate babysitting meat except it is a Saturday night and I’ve nowhere to be.
The Good Cook dinner System helps you to add the thermometer into a bit of meat you are cooking, enter the kind of meat and the specified doneness, after which the grill will shut off and provide you with a warning when the meals is prepared. It lets me cook dinner a pleasant reduce of meat with out worrying about below or overcooking it whereas I are likely to facet dishes.
Each time I cooked steak on the Ninja good grill, it got here out an ideal medium-rare (my private choice). I beloved having the ability to flit across the kitchen to concentrate on different duties — making mashed potatoes, simmering peas, getting ready a mushroom sauce — whereas the Ninja did the work of conserving tabs on the protein.
The air frying mode additionally delivers when it comes to efficiency. It produced ultra-crispy fries twice over and was extremely simple to scrub afterward. There’s sufficient room within the fryer basket to cook dinner as much as two kilos of meals.
I used a few of the different settings much less continuously than the grill or air fryer mode, however they carried out equally nicely. I used the griddle as soon as to rapidly cook dinner up thinly sliced beef for rice bowls and it labored like a allure, although I most popular utilizing the grill as a result of it is securely locked into place. The griddle accent sits on prime of the grill grates and whereas it is pretty safe, it does transfer round barely.
I additionally used the broiling setting to soften Havarti cheese on subs for dinner one night time. The outcomes had been just like utilizing my oven’s broiler. Although I missed having a window to peep inside and ensure nothing was burning, it is simple sufficient to pop open the lid.
The roasting setting helped me cook dinner a juicy pork tenderloin. This setting works very similar to the oven, however the good thing about the Ninja is that preheating is far faster and you’ll hold tabs on meat temperature with the good thermometer. My full-size oven truly has a built-in thermometer, however there is no method to choose a goal temperature.
I did not use the dehydrating or baking features however I believe they work simply as nicely. And simply having 5 easy-to-use, go-to cooking features affords loads of worth in my thoughts.
One other advantage of utilizing the Ninja grill is that regardless of reaching excessive temps, it does not produce clouds of smoke — one thing that appears to occur continuously after I cook dinner on the stovetop. And just about nothing will get caught to the grill due to its slippery ceramic nonstick coating. You possibly can cook dinner with the lid open or closed. The included information offers you with steerage on when to close or open it.
Cons to think about
This good indoor grill is a wonderful kitchen accent, but it surely’s arduous to disregard how cumbersome it’s. It isn’t a tool for tiny kitchens or these missing cupboard space. Except you propose to maintain it in your counter, I can think about that some folks would hate dragging it out and in of storage.
However whereas it is cumbersome, I personally suppose it is well worth the sq. footage it takes up.
Ninja’s advertising additionally boasts a few spacious cooking floor that may accommodate as much as six steaks. However, the cooktop is smaller than I anticipated for such a big system. It really works nicely when cooking for 2, however I believe issues will get a bit crowded in the event you attempt to cook dinner for a crowd of greater than 4 folks.
What are your options?
Different indoor grilling choices embody:
Nonetheless, the Ninja Foodi Indoor Grill is exclusive in its design in comparison with different choices. Most indoor grills are constructed extra like a panini press the place you sandwich the meat between two heated plates. The Ninja’s design is extra akin to a conventional out of doors grill; it has a lid, however just one cooking floor. I feel this design offers extra management over cooking and a extra genuine grilling expertise.
The Ninja additionally has a plethora of different settings, like air frying and dehydrating, that you do not usually discover in different indoor grills.
The underside line
In case you have the area, the Ninja Foodi XL Professional Indoor Grill is a good purchase. It performs all its features nicely sufficient that it actually does act as a seven-in-one cooking system. Toss out that air fryer, toaster oven, and dehydrator as a result of this UFO-looking grill can do all of it — and by paring down on devices, you will have extra room for this versatile cooking behemoth.
Execs: Smokeless operation, guided cooking utilizing the good thermometer, seven easy-to-use cook dinner modes, grill or griddle with the lid open or closed, fast preheating
Cons: Heavy and troublesome to retailer