Breville Halo Rotisserie Air Fryer review

Air fryers come in all shapes and sizes, offering unique functionalities to simplify your cooking.

For those with larger families, air fryer ovens are becoming a popular choice thanks to their large cooking areas and multifunctions.

The Breville Halo Rotisserie Air Fryer boasts an impressive 10-litre capacity and has room for multiple cooking trays, allowing you to cook different foods at once. It even has a rotisserie cooking cage.

It can air fry, bake, roast, and dehydrate your food just like a traditional oven. According to Breville, the halo air fryer requires 99.5% less oil compared to its standard air fryers.

So far, so impressed. In our bid to find the best air fryer, we put the machine to the test to see how it handles cooking and baking some of our favourite vegan foods.

Technical details:

• Dimensions: 32.5D x 35W x 36.3H cm
• Capacity: 10L
• Functions: Air fry, bake, dehydrate, rotisserie
• Temperature range: 50°C to 200°C
• Where to buy: Amazon

Pros:

• Large cooking capacity
• Can cook different foods at once
• Controllable interior light to monitor cooking progress without opening the door
• Stylish design
• Fast cooking
• Recipes are included in the instruction booklet to get you started
• Responsive touchscreen display

Cons:

• Difficult to open the oven door
• Takes up a lot of counter space
• Food on the top shelf cooks faster than on the bottom shelf

Ease of set up

Like so many air fryers, this one is pretty large. After wrestling with its box to get it out and onto the kitchen counter, I marvelled at its size. The good thing is that it’s definitely not an eye-sore, the sleek curved corners and glossy black details are very attractive and would look great in all modern kitchens.

There are a lot of accessories to get your head around. Thankfully, the instructions are thorough and talk you through all of the extra parts and functions. The air fryer comes with 3 air flow racks, a 3.2L mesh basket, a rotisserie spit, and a rotisserie handling fork. There’s also an additional removable drip tray which gets placed at the bottom of the air fryer.

Thanks to the 3 air flow racks, you can cook different foods at once, as long as they can all be cooked at the same temperature and time.

If like me, you’re a person who had never used a rotisserie air fryer, this is a nifty function that allows you to evenly cook larger items slowly and evenly. Although the rotisserie spit is recommended for cooking meat, the rotisserie mesh basket can be used to cook fries, vegetables, roasted nuts, and other foods.

Presets and functions

Breville’s Halo air fryer features 4 preset cooking functions, as well as 3 manual settings to air fry, bake, or dehydrate your food plus controls to manually set the time and temperature.

There is also a handy light switch that illuminates the interior of the air fryer, allowing you to monitor your cooking progress without needing to open the door and let out precious heat – genius!

Setting up the air fryer itself is pretty straightforward thanks to the instructions. Before its initial use, it’s recommended to turn the air fryer on for 15 minutes at 200°C to remove residue from the manufacturer. After that, you’re ready to get cooking.

The instructions feature a useful oven cooking chart which lists the best way to cook popular foods like chips (fresh and frozen), vegetables, and dehydrated fruit and veg. It explains what function and accessory to use, as well as cooking time, temperature, and how much oil is required. To get you started, the instructions feature 4  air fryer recipes, although, only 1 of the recipes was vegan.

There were some issues opening the air fryer door – I found it really stiff to open and it almost felt as if I was going to break the door handle. To make sure I wasn’t being a weakling, I got 2 other people to open it and they both agreed that it was tricky.

Cooking results – cooking chips in the Breville Halo air fryer

If you’ve read our previous air fryer reviews, you know that we always start our cooking test with homemade chips.

I chopped the potatoes into chips and soaked them in water for 10 minutes. Once soaked, I dried and coated them with olive oil spray and placed the chips evenly across 2 of the air flow rack.

Interestingly, the cooking chart recommends cooking hand-cut fresh chips for 35-40 minutes in the rotating mesh basket or for 30-35 minutes using the air flow racks, so in the interest of saving time, I opted to use the air flow rack. Using the touchscreen, I selected the chip preset function which set the machine to 200°C for 20 minutes.

After 15 minutes I used the light switch to check on the chips’ progress – they were ready! Although the air fryer cooked the chips faster than recommended, the top layer was overcooked compared to the bottom layer. Thankfully they were still edible.

I’ll add that because the air flow racks are made from a wire mesh, it allows hot air to freely circulate meaning you don’t need to turn the chips around halfway, but I’d advise switching the trays around midway to allow them to cook evenly.

Cooking results – crispy tofu

Crispy tofu is a firm favourite of mine, so I was keen to cook up a batch. To prepare my tofu, I simply pressed as much water out as possible before breaking it up into bite-sized chunks and lightly coating it in chickpea flour for extra crispiness.

Once the tofu was ready, I covered it with a few sprays of olive oil and placed the chunks evenly on both trays. I manually set the air fryer to 200°C for 15 and let it do its thing.

After overcooking my chips, I was cautious to not let the same thing happen to my tofu. Using the interior air fryer light, I closely monitored the tofu making sure it wasn’t catching.

12 minutes later, I removed the tofu and was pleased with how even it was cooked. There were a few smaller pieces that were slightly darker than the rest, but overall I was satisfied. I was particularly impressed by how fast it was cooking the food.

Cooking results – pastries

Sweet pastries are my go-to brunch, especially as most pre-made pastries are accidentally vegan. I wanted to see how the Breville air fryer oven could handle baking, so I slathered a roll of short-crust pastry with jam before cutting it into strips and rolling them up.

On a lined tray, I placed the jam pastries and brushed them with oat milk. Using the bake function, I cooked the pastries at 180°C for 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, the timer went off and the pastries were turning golden and the jam was caramelising. I cooked them for an additional 5 minutes to ensure the pastry was cooked throughout, and after that they were ready to eat.

There were some pastries that looked darker than others, but that was where the jam had caught.

Overall verdict of the Breville Halo Rottiserie air fryer

Despite a few teething issues, the Breville Halo air fryer certainly is impressive.

Once you find a suitable home for it on your kitchen counter, it’s sure to be a talking point for friends.

One of my favourite features is the clear window with the interior light switch to monitor your food while cooking. Although this seems like a simple thing and is common for most ovens, it’s rare that air fryers have this.

The Breville air fryer cooks food rapidly, almost too rapidly. Whilst this is a benefit, I’d recommend playing around with the cooking settings for the first tries and keeping a close eye on your food.

Despite not using it for this test, the biggest attraction to this machine is the rotisserie spike. As a vegan, I found it difficult to think of plant-based foods that would be suitable for that type of cooking. Perhaps something dense like a cauliflower or a butternut squash would work?

For those wanting more bang for their buck when it comes to air fryers, the Breville Halo is certainly a top choice especially if you want to get creative with your cooking techniques.

How we test air fryers

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? See how the Breville Halo Air Fryer compares to the Tower XpressPro Combo Air Fryer

Feature artwork created by Vegan Food & Living