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Midea has released a new air fryer that can cook two different items simultaneously, and we're eager to find out if it justifies the high price tag.

Let it be known I am incredibly skeptical of any kitchen gadget fad that gains traction on social media. I scoffed at the Instant Pot, noting that the crockpot I got on super-steep sale in 2013 was probably every bit as good.

From 2008 until 2018, I used a Westinghouse vegetable steamer-slash-rice cooker my mom received as a gift in the early 90s. Hell, I don't even own a microwave.

I hate storing things that I don't routinely use. Every appliance I have needs to earn a space in the entirely-too-cramped kitchens I always seem to find myself in.

So, for me, that has largely been an electric kettle, a toaster oven, and a crock pot. So, when air fryers hit the scene several years back, I had said I'd never buy one. It was just a convection oven, after all.

In 2017, my mom gifted me an air fryer that sat unused for about a year. That was until my beloved toaster oven finally bit the dust after providing me with years of reliable service. Instead of rushing out to buy a new toaster oven, I figured I'd unbox the air fryer I'd been gifted.

You might be asking if it was the life-changing experience that everyone on TikTok and Instagram would lead you to believe. In a word, no. It didn't magically make my life easier or make the food I was already preparing taste that much better.

What it was, however, was fast and convenient in a way that my previous toaster oven hadn't been. So, begrudgingly, I became an air fryer convert.

So, when Midea asked if I wanted to check out a new air fryer, I decided maybe it was worth a look.

The Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer is an interesting take on air fryers. It combines the typical basket-style air fryer on the top paired with a small toaster oven-style air fryer on the bottom.

But I was skeptical — would it be that much of an improvement over my current air fryer?

Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer review — design:

Let's get this out of the way first: this is a large countertop appliance. It stands 15.7 inches tall, 14.6 inches deep, and 12.5 inches wide. That is a sizable amount of counter space to take up.

It also clocks in at over 20lbs, so you might be less excited to take it off your counter and store it elsewhere.

So, if your counter space is at a premium, you might not want to invest in an air fryer. That is unless you plan on using it nearly every day — which I do.

It's also not the first dual-zone air fryer I've seen. Ninja's DualZone XL provides you with two 5-quart baskets — though they're situated side by side, making it an even beefier appliance.

But, it differs from some of the other dual-zone air fryers because it doesn't combine two air frying baskets. Instead, it features a traditional air fryer basket on top and a toaster oven-like compartment on the bottom.

The toaster oven compartment also features a convection fan, so you can still technically air fry in both compartments.

Midea claims that the air fryer has a capacity of eleven quarts, but I do not agree with that. While the top basket probably holds six quarts, the bottom compartment most definitely does not hold five.

The bottom compartment is the size of a small toaster oven, and you can't pile things up on it like you would in an air fryer basket. That said, it still can hold up to a nine-inch pizza or one of those Marie Callendar ready-to-bake frozen pies, should you be so inclined to heat one up in there.

The biggest reason I was excited to try out the Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer was Sync Finish. Sync Finish is a feature that allows you to cook two different foods simultaneously while still having them finish together.

When enabled, the air fryer will first start the item with the longest cooking time and hold the second item until the time matches up. This tiny feature is a lifesaver if you're trying to get dinner together without worrying about estimating the cooking times of each item.

Putting the Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer to the test

I skip breakfast in favor of black coffee nearly every day. When lunchtime rolls around, I'm also not making healthy choices.

Some days, when I remember, I'll drink one of those "nutritionally complete" meal replacement shakes. Sometimes, I'll just crack open a can of spaghetti-o's and eat them at my desk. On other days, especially particularly busy ones, I'll skip lunch entirely.

What can I say, I'm a millennial.

However, I've been trying to do better about consuming actual food for lunch, which has often meant just eating a piece of air-fried, precooked chicken breast. It's better than nothing, but I sometimes wish I had other things with it.

However, I don't have time in the middle of the day to whip up a full meal, and as mentioned above, I don't own a microwave, so meal prep isn't something I partake in often.

But the Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer promises to change this by allowing you to cook two things simultaneously.

So, to put this to the test, I decided I'd see if I could make an entirely hands-off real meal in 20 minutes. I figured I'd supplement my usual chicken breast with roasted asparagus and a side of rice.

I lightly oiled the chicken breast, hit it with my favorite margarita seasoning, and dropped it into the air fryer basket. I oiled and salted my asparagus and threw it into the toaster oven compartment.

I set the chicken to bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes and the asparagus to roast at 390 degrees for 8 minutes. I made sure Sync Finish was enabled and started the cooking.

I added my quick-cook rice to my rice cooker along with hot water and set it to cook.

Twenty minutes later, I opened the Dual Zone Air Fryer to see what I had.

The asparagus was perfect. I hit it with fresh lemon juice and some crushed red pepper flakes. In fact, it was so good that when I prepared dinner for my partner and me a few hours later, I made it again.

The chicken was moderately dry — though it looks drier than it actually was. Some of this is just how it is when you use precooked frozen chicken breasts, but this does show how one air fryer may differ from the other. My old air fryer would not have cooked it quite this far. However, I was expecting a certain level of trial and error, and fortunately, I'm not really that bothered by dry chicken breast.

Still, when I do this again, I'd probably knock it down another 10 degrees and drop the cooking time to 15 minutes.

All things considered, it was a solid meal that took me about five minutes of prep in total. And it's certainly more respectable than a can of Spaghetti-o's.

Since then, I've used it to air fry french fries and frozen crab rangoon, roast cherry tomatoes and peppers, reheat leftover pizza, and even bake some frozen cookies. And truthfully, it's easily handled every cooking task I've thrown at it.

But that doesn't mean it's perfect.

Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer review — The good:

Let's start with the positives of the Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer. There's a lot to like about it — and I mean a lot. From a hardware standpoint, it's pretty slick.

Cleanup is a breeze

My last air fryer was a real pain to clean, which meant I didn't clean it as often as I should. Gross, I know, but that's just how it goes sometimes.

However, the Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer is extremely easy to clean.

I don't have a dishwasher, but Midea says it's dishwasher-safe. I find it easy enough to take the tray out from the fry basket and scrub it down in the sink, and the fry basket washes up just as easily.

Same with the toaster oven tray — just some hot water, soap, and a little elbow grease, and it looks as good as new.

It's great for small families and small spaces

Now, that isn't to say that it doesn't occupy a sizable chunk of your countertop — it does. But if you're a single person or a couple, it's worth keeping on your counter.

After all, you can easily cook enough food for two people in the Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer. Its small size and convection heating means you're not wasting time using a full-sized oven to cook up two pieces of chicken.

Sure, I wouldn't get this air fryer if you were a family of five. By that point, an air fryer is significantly less practical than using a large oven to bake a tray of fries and chicken nuggets.

But again, if you have a small family or are single, it's hard to beat having something that's this easy to use and clean.

It doesn't heat up your kitchen

And ultimately, this is the reason why I'm an air fryer convert. I live in a house that is, as of this year, 144 years old. I don't have central air.

I cool my downstairs using a single window unit air conditioner, which incidentally is also from Midea — the Midea U-shaped Air Conditioner.

Turning on my oven when it's 80 degrees outside is not an option. Honestly, I'm not even particularly thrilled about cooking on the stove.

This isn't an attribute unique to this air fryer, but rather air fryers in general. They, like toaster ovens, don't raise the temperature of your house the way an oven does. So, if you're trying to save energy or can't heat your home up, an air fryer is a solid investment.

Sync Finish is a game changer

I hate the balancing act of trying to get every item to the table hot and ready. I've never been particularly good at it, which probably explains my predilection toward one-pot meals or sides that don't need to be served hot.

Sync Finish, however, alleviates some of that stress. Now, whenever I'm roasting vegetables, I can ensure they will be done at the same time as my protein, which is great. And, even if I botch the cooking time of one item, the other can be held at a low temperature, ensuring everything is still hot when it gets to the table.

It is worth noting that Sync Finish is not unique to Midea air fryers and that Instant — the same brand that makes the very Instant Pot I decried at the beginning of the review — also has a two-basket air fryer with Sync Finish.

Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer review — The bad

However, for as good as the features work, it's not perfect. I was surprised how frustrated I was at a kitchen appliance — especially one that ostensibly works.

Extremely frustrating setup

I'll delve into the app in a section below, but let me just start by saying the setup for this device was one of the more frustrating setups I've had to deal with.

While you can use it right out of the box, Midea advertises that it works with an app. I typically balk at smart appliances because they often overcomplicate simple things. However, it's my job to review this sort of thing, so I wasn't going to skip this feature.

But damned if I wasn't proven right once again.

I downloaded the SmartHome app from the App Store as per the manual. Then, I opened it. The app didn't automatically detect the air fryer, so I was prompted to add the device manually. Sure, fine.

I scrolled through the app and found the Midea Air Fryer section. There were four nearly identical images with model numbers on them. I checked the model number of my device.

None of them matched. Off to a great start. I bit the bullet and decided to select one of the air fryers that looked most similar to mine, and it did wind up connecting to the air fryer. I'm not entirely sure what to make of that.

Part of the setup process was untranslated, so again, I was just guessing what it could be asking me — I clicked the control knob. And, again, it seemed to work, but I still can't figure out why it needed to fight me every step of the way.

The slots in the fry tray are a bit big

This is a relatively small gripe, but one I'll share nonetheless. The fry tray has slots big enough for small food items, like shoestring french fries, to fall through.

While this isn't a deal breaker, it does mean you'll have a couple of fries fall through when you shake the basket, or some that get wedged halfway through and are hard to remove.

Bad documentation

One thing that drove me insane was the fact that there's no documentation on how to change it from Celsius to Fahrenheit. This isn't a big deal for me, as I have a science degree, so needing to understand Celsius is just second nature. I've also done enough baking, and half of the baking blogs I read aren't based in the United States.

However, if you're going to have, say, a hungry teenager come home and throw in a bunch of pizza rolls, it becomes a little less ideal.

A quick Google search led me to a video of a gentleman with the same problem. The manufacturer told him you needed to press and hold the top and bottom temperature buttons for three seconds. Sure enough, that did it.

But, for whatever reason, the air fryer doesn't remember that you've switched it to Fahrenheit the next time you cook. I'm curious as to why this is the way it was designed.

Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer review — The ugly

I've been beating this drum for what feels like a decade now, but I would like to know why most smart home product apps are still terrible.

The SmartHome app isn't even consistently terrible, making it more frustrating. I use the same app to control my window unit air conditioners, which works flawlessly.

This just leaves me wondering why the part that manages the air fryer is genuinely maddening.

I'll set the time and temperature for the top and bottom compartments and enable Sync Finish in the app. When it comes time to hit "start," it defaults both the top and bottom back to 200 degrees Celsius and starts them simultaneously.

Sometimes, it also just sets whatever I'm cooking to cook for 20 minutes. So, essentially, controlling the air fryer from the app is pointless.

The app is also riddled with typos and misspellings, and the recipe section is confusing to swipe through.

But this isn't just a SmartHome app problem- this is how many smart product apps exist. If we're going to insist on having smart home devices, we really need to make some better strides in the apps that are pretty much required to go with them.

Is the Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer worth it — yes, but also no

I love this air fryer. I really, truly do. It checks all the boxes I need it to. Admittedly, my list of required features is small — it can cook a substantial amount of food and is easy to clean.

It also doesn't take up my entire counter, which is great, considering I barely have any counter space. The addition of Sync Finish makes this air fryer feel fancier and more useful.

However, this thing is expensive, and I assume a large portion of its price tag is because it's "smart." And because the app is barely functional, it feels like a slap in the face for Midea to ask for $250 for an appliance that routinely retails for under $60. Even other dual air fryers slide in closer to the $200 mark than the $250 one.

It's way more expensive than I'd be willing to recommend normally. However, let's not discount the discounts.

Currently, the Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer is on sale at Amazon for $179.99, and if you snag it now, you can even take an additional $40 off. That drops the $249.99 price tag to $139.99 — a full $110 off. It's still not a cheap device, but at that price, I can easily recommend it — just don't bother with the app.

Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer - Pros

Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer - Cons

Midea 2 Zone Air Fryer rating: 3 out of 5 stars