Photo: Cosori
What We Like
- Decent 5.8-quart fryer capacity
- Advanced 360° air circulation
- Intuitive multi-function touch operation
- A wide 170℉ – 400℉ temperature range
- 11 one-touch presets
- Easy-to-clean baskets
What We Don’t Like
- No accessories included
- Short 1-year warranty
Bottom Line
Advanced air circulation technology, robust cooking settings, and an intuitive control system make this air fryer the ultimate choice for mid-sized families.
Introduction
For meals of 3 to 5 people, there’s no air fryer that gets the job done better than the Cosori CP158-AF.
It is a powerful fryer that relies on a 360° air circulation system for efficient heat distribution and even cooking. Operating the fryer is simplified by a one-touch LED panel with cooking presets and other intuitive features to enhance the process.
Cosori CP158-AF Review
Photo: Cosori
Cooking Performance: Fast and Advanced Food Preparation
This air fryer was designed to cook food efficiently and fast. It features Cosori’s 360° Air Circulation Technology to reduce the fat content in your food significantly. Accordingly, to the manufacturer, it reduces fat content by up to 85% compared to traditional deep fryers.
Read More: Air Fryer vs. Deep Fryer
With its 5.8-quart basket size, this air fryer can prepare a food serving for 3-5 people, making it ideal for small-to-medium families. But beyond this capacity, it cooks food fast, ensuring that you can have your meals ready in no time.
To help maximize the fryer’s cooking performance, it has been equipped with an intuitive digital control panel with a bright LED display. This display is large enough for clear viewing and is touch-enabled for fast interactions.
What you’ll enjoy most from the control panel are the robust one-touch cooking options you can choose from, including Preheat, Keep Warm, Auto Shutoff, Memory Function, and Shake Reminder. It eliminates the tedious task of calculation time and temperature by doing all that for you automatically and optimizing these settings for the best cooking outcomes.
There’s the well-thought and neat “Shake” feature that’s worth highlighting because of the value it adds to the cooking process. A shake reminder has been built into the air fryer control and it lets you when to shake the contents.
By shaking, you are promoting the heat transmission process, which helps achieve even frying, especially when cooking shrimp, frozen foods, French fries, and vegetables. Then there’s the Keep Warm function that retains your food’s warmth for a while before you empty the basket.
Note, however, that it takes getting used to the many features of the fryer’s control panel especially because they are represented in symbols.
Design: Stylish Contemporary Look
The CP158-AF is one of the most stylish consumer air fryers you can buy today. It has a strong plastic housing with a glossy finish, which is available in black, red, and white colors.
When sitting on the counter, it screams premium style, making it a great complement to the modern contemporary kitchen. Speaking of the counter, this fryer does not occupy a lot of space. The entire unit is about the size of an Instant Pot.
It is designed such that no assembly is required. You can use it out of the box. You simply remove all packaging material, and when you use it for the first time, check the manual for guidelines on how to separate the 2 baskets, though it’s nothing complicated.
At only 14.5 pounds in weight, the unit is not heavy by air fryer standards. You can occasionally shift its position across the counter with relative ease.
Temperature Control: Robust and Simplified
The air fryer offers a robust temperature range of 170℉ – 400℉ ( 77°C – 205°C ), which is large enough to accommodate frying of a wide food variety, with custom temperature configurations.
One of the top highlights of CP158-AF’s temperature control is the pre-heating feature, which deserves recognition because not so many air fryers offer it.
Pre-heating can transform your food by visibly improving its texture. And the beauty of this feature in your CP158-AF is that it takes very little time, between 2 and 5 minutes. In fact, it is recommended that you preheat the fryer prior to placing food in it, to ensure thorough cooking.
You can pre-heat the fryer for up to 5 minutes at a temperature between 380℉ and 400℉. The amount of pre-heating time reduces with a reduction in temperature, and this will depend on the food you want to fry.
Besides pre-heating, the fryer offers 11 preset cooking options, each of which has its optimal temperature setting and default cooking time, including shake reminders. The fryer’s user manual has a detailed list of all the presets plus a lot more information.
Finally, it is possible for you to switch the temperature units between Celsius and Fahrenheit. This feature comes in handy especially when the recipe you’re cooking uses either of the two units and may require you to switch.
Ease of Cleaning: Dishwasher Safe Components
CP158-AF’s sophistication may lead you to conclude that cleaning it is difficult, but that’s not the case. Cleaning this unit and its components is surprisingly easy and fast.
To achieve the best outcomes, it recommended that you clean the fryer after every use. Not only does this preserve the durability of the appliance and its components, but it also keeps it constantly free of germs and contaminants.
Before cleaning the unit, unplug it and allow it to cool. You can hasten this process by removing the baskets. For exterior cleaning, simply wipe the housing with a moist cloth or towel. This approach helps especially with smudge removal.
You’ll be pleased to know that the fryer’s baskets are dishwasher safe. They save you a lot of cleaning time and effort. If the dishwasher is not an option, you can also hand-wash these with hot, soapy water and a non-abrasive sponge.
Sometimes, the baskets may contain stubborn grease that gentle washing may fail to effectively remove. If you encounter such a case, simply mix half a cup of baking soda and with a little water to create a paste that you can apply on the baskets. Then clean it off later with soapy water.
As a precaution, the fryer should not be immersed in water. Also, avoid using abrasive materials and metal utensils that can damage the non-stick coating on the baskets.
Accessories
The CP158-AF is not offered with any bonus accessories apart from the handy recipe book that contains 100 original recipes from the Cosori Kitchen.
You can, however, grab the highly-recommended set of Cosori 5.8-Quart Air Fryer Accessories, which offer high cooking versatility at a very affordable price.
This 6-piece set includes 1 cake pan, 1 pizza pan, 1 metal holder, 1 multi-purpose skewer rack with skewers, 1 silicone mat, and 1 egg bites mold with lid. Cosori specifically chose the combination that would meet all your cooking needs best.
The set will support other Cosori air fryers provided they are the 5.3-quart and larger-capacity models.
Price: Great Value for Money
The CP158-AF is priced such that you never have to think twice about getting the air fryer. It is very pocket-friendly, given the premium and advanced features it offers, not to mention its convenient operation that just makes cooking a pure joy.
When you consider functions such as 11 cooking presets, an intuitive touch panel, preheating options, and the ease of cleaning, this is the kind of air fryer you’re likely never going to upgrade from, unless your food preparation demands increase substantially.
Even though you’re getting this air fryer at a bargain price, Cosori offers other competitive rival models such as the CP258-AF, which costs slightly more, but features a stainless-steel housing. Besides this design enhancement, it offers similar features to the CP158-AF.
Also, there’s the more affordable CO158-AF, which offers the same 5.8-capacity, but misses out on the intuitive touch display, instead of relying on a manual dial for temperature control. It doesn’t come with any presets. The CP158-AF makes up for all these shortcomings.
Verdict
A premium air fryer than offers superior heating efficiency and plenty of cooking configurations to support diverse meals.
The Cosori CP158-AF’s 11 cooking presets save you time and effort while its advanced air circulation delivers heat evenly across your food. And with the intuitive one-touch LED panel, this air fryer is very easy to operate, making it a great family appliance.
Specs
- Product Name: Cosori CP158-AF
- Product Brand: Cosori
- Product Dimensions: 12. 6 x 11. 8 x 11. 8 inches
- Power: 120 volts, 1700 watts
- Basket Dimensions: 9 x 9 x 3.75 inches
- Basket Capacity: 5.8 quarts (5.5 liters)
- Heat Capacity: 170℉ – 400℉
- Material(s): Non-stick, Plastic (PFOA-free & BPA-free)
- Warranty: 1 year
- Product Weight: 14.5 pounds
Key Features
- Advanced 360° Air Circulation technology reduces fat content in food
- Decent 5.8-quart capacity for small-to-medium family meals
- An intuitive LED touch panel for simplified and convenient operation
- 11 cooking presets that supports robust temperature and cooking modes
- A wide 170℉ – 400℉ range of cooking temperature
- Pre-heating feature for the improvement of food texture
- A handy shake reminder that helps enhance even cooking
- Detectable easy-to-clean nonstick baskets