Review: The Ninja CRISPi Pro Delivers Power, Versatility, And Convenience In One Small Package

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Air fryers are nearly as ubiquitous in the average kitchen as microwaves or ovens are nowadays, and as such, there's no shortage of air fryer options on the market. If you've even so much as pondered the idea of purchasing an air fryer, there's a good chance that Ninja is a brand you've stumbled across. Ninja offers a whole slew of small kitchen appliances, and of those varied offerings, you'll find air fryers aplenty. Ranging from dual-basket air fryers to compact ones, Ninja is something of a pioneer in the air fryer game, and this sentiment is further proven by the brand's latest offering, the Ninja CRISPi Pro.

Right off the bat, it's easy to see how the CRISPi Pro looks a little different than your average air fryer. It has a glass basket and overall sleek design, along with a rather simple control panel limited to a few buttons and a knob. But does the air fryer operate quite as seamlessly as its appearance would suggest? That's the question that I set out to answer here in my Ninja CRISPi Pro review.

To adequately test the air fryer, I put all six of its supposed functions — air fry, max crisp, recrisp, roast, bake/proof, and dehydrate — to the test, cooking various foods in the appliance to see how they turned out. In this review, I'll cover the general specs of the Ninja CRISPi Pro, its price point, what foods you could cook in it, how well each of the functions work, and conclude with final thoughts about the product and whether I think it's worth purchasing.

The Ninja CRISPi Pro follows a long line of Ninja-brand air fryers, though its closest ancestor is the 4-in-1 Ninja Crispi portable air fryer, which has a similar design with a glass basket. Available in a handful of colors, the CRISPi Pro is a countertop air fryer that is actually quite compact (it looked almost dainty in the corner of my kitchen). The box came stocked with the air fryer base itself, 6-quart and 2.5-quart glass air fryer baskets (there is also a compatible 4-quart basket out there, but you have to buy that separately), lids that fit over both baskets, and two removable trays that fit into the baskets.

What really makes the CRISPi Pro stand out, aside from its design, is its functionality. The air fryer specifically boasts six distinct cooking functions, starting with the classic air fryer function that heats or cooks food and ideally ensures that the food gets nice and crispy. Then there's the max crisp function, which blasts the food at an even higher heat to supposedly ensure even more crispiness. Next is the recrisp function, which is apparently best for reheating leftovers. 

There's also a roast function, ideal for roasting veggies or meats, and a bake/proof function for making cookies and baked goods galore (or providing a place for dinner rolls to proof before turning on the appliance and baking them). Finally, this air fryer also has a low-heat dehydrate function, which would be ideal for those looking to make dried fruit or jerky. 

Though I was a bit intimidated by the Ninja CRISPi Pro at first, I found the set-up to be quite intuitive. Depending on how much food you're heating up (or how big your food item is), you'll decide between using the 6-quart or 2.5-quart basket. Either way, you'll want to make sure that the air fryer tray is pressed into the bottom of whatever basket you want to use.

Next, you'll want to make sure that the modular base is adjusted properly. This long, metal piece either rests at the bottom of the air fryer or in one of the two notches on the back neck part of the air fryer, depending on which basket you're using. To place the 6-quart basket, for example, you'd place the modular base at the bottom most notch, then slide the basket all the way in (you should be able to both feel and hear when the basket clicks into place). 

Otherwise, setting up the air fryer to actually start cooking is very easy, too. Depending on which function you want to use, you'll turn the knob until that function is highlighted on the display screen, then you press the knob in to start cooking. Each function comes with a preset temperature and time, but you can adjust those as well by using the corresponding buttons on the control panel. If you need to stop cooking, you can either press the knob in to pause or simply pull the basket out (which prompts the air fryer to stop cooking until the basket is pushed pack into place). 

There's virtually no limit to what kinds of foods you can cook in the Ninja CRISPi Pro, ranging from the typical suspects to more unexpected foods that you could cook in an air fryer. For starters, all sorts of those air fryer frozen classics are fair game here. Frozen fries (or homemade ones), mozzarella sticks, pizza rolls, chicken nuggets, tater tots, or any of the best Trader Joe's snacks to pop in your air fryer would be great options when using the air fry, max crisp, recrisp, or even roast functions. Speaking of that roast function, this one is best suited for veggies like broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, or carrots. Meats are also fair game with the roast (or air fry) function, and with the 6-quart basket, you could even cook an entire chicken in the air fryer.

Thanks to the CRISPi Pro's more unique functions, like the bake/proof and dehydrate functions, baked goods and dried snacks are also in the realm of possibility. Cookies, brownies, croissants, small cakes, muffins, or dinner rolls are options you could make with the bake function. For the dehydrate function, dried fruits like oranges, apples, or bananas would work, along with dried snacks like homemade beef jerky or even veggies like carrots or mushrooms. 

There really are very many recipe and food possibilities with this Ninja air fryer. Plus, the appliance comes with a recipe book to provide inspiration or to serve as a kicking-off point for those who don't quite know where to begin with so many options.

If you're interested in purchasing a Ninja CRISPi Pro for yourself, there are quite a few places to buy from, and all with similar if not identical price points. For starters, you can purchase the air fryer directly from Shark-Ninja's website and have your pick of four base colors. The price of the air fryer (with the included two baskets and lids) is $279.99. 

Other potential places to buy the Ninja CRISPi Pro online include Amazon, Target, Bed Bath & Beyond, Macy's, or Crate & Barrel. Each of these retailers features the air fryer at the same price point, $279.99, with the exception of Crate & Barrel, which has it priced at $279.95. As for finding the Ninja CRISPi Pro in-store, Target seems to be the best bet at the time of this writing, but actual availability will, of course, depend on your location and the nearest store's inventory. 

Perhaps the most important function of the Ninja CRISPi Pro, at least in my humble opinion, is the air fry function (since the appliance is an air fryer, after all). The included recipe booklet suggested that this function would be particularly useful when cooking fresh meats, so I decided to put the air fry function to the test with chicken drumsticks. I loaded the drums into the 6-quart basket (dressed with a little bit of olive oil and seasoning), made sure the "AirFry" function was highlighted on the screen, then pressed the knob to start cooking. By default, the temperature was set at 390 F, and the time was set for 20 minutes (but these could easily be adjusted, if needed).

By cooking chicken drumsticks, in particular, I was hopeful that the chicken would both cook quickly and end up with a crispy skin while staying juicy on the inside. And I have to say, I was impressed on all counts. The chicken cooked quickly, reaching an internal temp of about 165 F within 15 minutes. The inside was impeccably tender and juicy while the skin got super crispy. 

I found that the glass basket was particularly useful when using this function and cooking this particular food, because I could easily see how quickly the chicken was browning and easily determine when it was the best time to flip the drums. Overall, I consider the air fry function to be a huge success based on my test run.

If there's one food that I want to end up as crispy as possible, it's french fries. Well, ideally, the fries would stay soft and fluffy on the inside but crispy on the outside, and realistically, there's no better appliance to achieve such a feat than an air fryer. Specifically, I put the Ninja CRISPi Pro's max crisp function to the test for frozen fries, though you could easily just use the air fry function for such a food. I wanted to see what made the max crisp function different, which from what I can tell, is just a matter of higher heat (a default of 450 F instead of 390 F). 

With such a high heat did indeed come a crispy result, though I felt a bit conflicted about the results. My fries heated up incredibly quickly, almost to the point where they got perhaps a bit too crispy on the outside. Based on my test run, I found that the maxed-out max crisp heat setting was maybe just a touch too high, though my test is, of course, limited to one batch of frozen fries. 

If there's something that you want to get really, really crispy, like maybe skin-on salmon or potato skins, then this function may be more useful. For me, I found it to be effective on my fries, but I'm not sure I'd choose this function over the regular air fry one in the future. 

To test the bake function of the Ninja CRISPi Pro, I whipped up a batch of Betty Crocker chocolate chip cookie mix and attempted to cook four cookies. The included booklet featured a cookie recipe, and the instructions called for laying out a piece of parchment paper before placing the cookie dough on top. So, while I didn't follow that specific recipe, I did follow those instructions before placing four cookie dough balls down and setting the air fryer to the bake/proof function.

An issue I ran into was that, when the cooking first begins, the machine blows air around in the basket for about 10 seconds before it settles into operating more like a straightforward oven. As such, the cookies and parchment blew around in the basket at first, which thus made it difficult to ensure that the cookie dough balls weren't touching or that the parchment didn't bunch up in the middle. As far as I can tell, there's no way to prevent this issue, because if you pull the basket out to readjust the cookies, it does the same air-blowing maneuver once you resume the cooking process. 

My cookies did turn out, for what it's worth, though they were slightly deformed because they got briefly blown around. Also, it was sort of hard to tell when the cookies were done baking since they browned so quickly on top — sort of the inverse to what would happen in the oven, where they'd brown more quickly on the bottom. The cookies did taste good, though I'm not sure if I found this function to be more useful or worthwhile than simply baking cookies in an oven.

The CRISPi Pro's recrisp function is somewhat of a unique one, largely because I wasn't quite sure how it could be different from the regular air fryer function. As one might assume, the recrisp function is designed for those food items that have already been cooked and need a little refresh, like leftover fries, vegetables, or meats. To test the function, I made use of the leftover chicken drumsticks that I'd initially cooked using the air fry function. The remaining drums were refrigerated for a full 24 hours after their initial air fry, so needless to say, that once-crispy skin was cold and soggy by the time I put the chicken to the recrisp test.

Operating at a default temperature of 340 F and set for 30 minutes, the recrisp function certainly was effective at reviving my day-old drums. I didn't cook them for the full 30 minutes, but instead for about 15 to get them back up to an internal temp of 165 F. The skin definitely got super crispy again, while the insides stayed relatively juicy and not dry. Though the chicken didn't taste as fresh as it did the first time around, it did still taste pretty good all things considered, and the recrisp function did, in fact, recrisp that skin to a T. 

I do wonder if the plain old air fry function might have yielded a similar result. But for what it's worth, the recrisp function was indeed a success at reviving leftover chicken and restoring some of its former crispy glory. 

Just about anything that you might roast in an oven is fair game when it comes to the Ninja CRISPi Pro's roast function. While I was tempted to roast a whole chicken, since I already used chicken drumsticks to test the air fry function, I decided to take a vegetable route with the roast function instead. And what better veggie to roast than good old broccoli? I was also curious to see if the broccoli might get that distinct roasted browning without the addition of oil, so I simply put plain, undressed broccoli into the 6-quart basket and set it to the roast function (which has a default temperature setting of 375 F). 

The broccoli did indeed roast up quite nicely, achieving that nice level of browning after about 10 minutes. This test run provided another instance where a glass basket proved to be very useful, so I could keep an eye on the broccoli and see when it started to brown without having to interrupt the cooking process. I consider the roast function to be a success based on my broccoli test run, and I'd imagine that other veggies (like roasted carrots, cauliflower, or even asparagus) might fare just as well.

Last but not least in the Ninja CRISPi Pro's function lineup is the dehydrate function, which certainly offers a lot of potential to all those DIY-ers and jerky lovers out there. I kept things simple and opted to test this function by making apple chips. I sliced a Honeycrisp apple with a mandoline (for even slices), sprinkled them with a little cinnamon, then loaded some into the basket. When you set the machine to the dehydrate function, the temperature is set to a low 150 F, and the time is set for 6 hours.

I had a similar issue with this function as I did with the cookies and the bake/proof function, which is that the initial burst of air caused my perfectly layered and spaced apple slices to go flying. Luckily, it wasn't an issue that the slices were sort of layered, but I'd imagine that it could be a bigger issue depending on what type of food you're making. Since I only had five slices in the air fryer, it didn't take them long to dehydrate, and after about 3 hours, my apple chips were where I wanted them to be. They were nice and crispy, sweet, and successful as far as I'm concerned. 

I do think you could accomplish a similar feat by simply baking apple slices in a very low-temp oven. But I can't deny that this air fryer was effective in yielding nicely dehydrated apple chips (and pretty quickly, for what it's worth). 

Based on its sleek and user-friendly design alone, I would certainly recommend the Ninja CRISPi Pro to (nearly) anyone in the market for an air fryer. Though I found some functions to work a little better than others, there's no denying that this air fryer is incredibly effective at crisping, recrisping, browning, and roasting foods very quickly. I appreciated how easy it was to set the machine up and operate it — while I did read the instruction manual, I feel like I almost didn't need to with how intuitive the air fryer's control panel was.

Of course, it is important to consider the Ninja CRISPi Pro's price, which is nearly $300. If you don't need a machine that has a bunch of features and are just looking for a reliable air fryer, then it'd be wise to opt for a more basic and less expensive air fryer. But if you (or someone you're shopping for) love the latest and greatest kitchen gadgets, then the Ninja CRISPi Pro doesn't disappoint. 

This is a powerful appliance given its small frame, and the multi-sized glass baskets are game changers for being able to see what your food looks like as it cooks. Between the intuitive design, controls, and effective cooking functions, the Ninja CRISPi Pro is one small kitchen appliance that I do think is worth it, even with a somewhat hefty price tag.