Proscenic T22 review Review
A high quality kitchen cooker with smart controls
Verdict
The Proscenic T22 air fryer is a high quality kitchen cooker with smart controls. Not everybody will see the point of the latter, but Proscenic’s app does a good job of simplifying things, and as a bonus it offers a decent range of recipes. Whether the T22’s smart features turn you on or not, this remains a stylish, large air fryer, capable of great results across a wide range of foods.
Pros
- Looks neat and stylish
- Smart features including voice control
- Good cooking
Cons
- 205℃ max temperature
- Slightly clunky food tray
Availability
- UKRRP: £119
- USARRP: $129
- EuropeRRP: €89
- CanadaRRP: CA$169
- Australiaunavailable
Introduction
It seems there’s nothing these days that can’t be had with smart features, and air fryers are no exception. Proscenic’s T22 is an update to the brand’s impressive T21 smart fryer. While we still aren’t sure it needs smart control – or so many buttons – this remains a high quality, good sized air fryer for family feasts.
Design and features
- Fairly stylish, if you like black plastic
- Loads of buttons, plus app control
- Dishwashable food basket and tray
Proscenic’s T22 smart air fryer is a fairly major update over the T21. Most obviously, it ditches the previous model’s brushed steel in favour of highly glossy black plastic throughout. It still looks great, if perhaps not quite as classy.
There’s been a more significant change to the food bucket. While it’s shrunk half a litre to a still-useful five-litre capacity, Proscenic has dropped the T21’s unusual slide out basket in favour of a more conventional lift-out food tray. While the T21 lets you tip food straight onto a plate without the risk of oil or crumbs coming with it, on the T22 you may need to use a spoon to serve up.
I say ‘may’ because the T22’s food tray fits a bit more tightly than the norm – at least it did on the sample I reviewed. Its cooking compartment isn’t tapered inwards toward the bottom, so you need to push the tray down into place against the resistance of the rubber buffers on each side. While that’s a bit of a pain, the flipside is that the tray does stay where you put it, even when you tip the container up – or it did on my machine.
The T22’s control panel is now on top, where it’s slightly easier to use. It’s still home to a huge array of preset buttons. In theory, these are a useful way to dial up the appropriate settings for given foods like pizza, cakes, fish or chips, but they can just be confusing – sometimes it’s easiest to just dial up the temperature and time you want. This fryer has a narrower temperature range than some rivals, spanning 75°C to 205°C. In theory, that could place it at a disadvantage when it comes to browning, but in fact, my tests suggested it’s not likely to be a problem.
You could use the T22 just like any other air fryer, but you’ll get more from it if you install the Proscenic app and connect the fryer to your Wi-Fi. The app mimics the buttons on the fryer itself, but it also offers a quicker way to dial up a temperature and time, and to enable the preheat or keep warm features. You can even schedule cooking, which could be useful for morning starts or planning a meal in advance.
The Proscenic app also contains tens of recipes, spanning food categories including various meats and seafood, potato, pastry, vegetable or pizza. You still need to do the cooking, but the app lets you start or schedule the fryer with the correct settings, straight from the recipe page. You can also add your own recipes, create collections, and see what you cooked and when.
I’m not convinced any air fryer needs smart features, but Proscenic has at least done a good job of implementing them. You can connect the app with Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, allowing you to quickly set a time and temperature by voice – that’s potentially a great feature for people with mobility problems. I also liked that the app notified me when cooking was finished, or when it was time to shake food.
Generally I found it fairly easy to control the fryer in the app, whereas my partner preferred the simplicity of just using the T22 directly, without having to reach for her phone.
Performance
- Excellent cooking
- Not particularly noisy
- Not everyone will warm to smart controls
Like all smart fryers, you need to run the T22 empty at a high temperature before you first use it to burn off any oils and other manufacturing residues. It produced such an unpleasant smell that I moved it to the garden. After this, and a quick wash, it was fine. I appreciated this air fryer’s big food compartment, which is easily big enough to take a family’s worth of chips. Being generally a bit lazy about cleaning, I was also happy that I could shove the whole basket and tray in the dishwasher after use – they usually came out perfectly clean.
Some fryers go up to 240°C so I wondered if the Proscenic T22’s 205°C maximum would be enough to properly brown food. I needn’t have worried. I started by cooking a selection of pre-prepared Indian snacks. The bhajis were lightly crisped, and still moist and fluffy inside, while the samosa was absolutely perfect – gently crisped without being dried out or overdone.
I used the T22’s chip preset quite a bit, as doing so automatically sets a shake reminder midway through cooking – set the same temperature and duration manually and you won’t get the reminder. For a big basket of frozen chips, the default 195°C 20-minute blast wasn’t quite enough. Adding on another four or five minutes is likely to produce much better results, particularly if you also boost the temperature a little.
I also nudged the temperature up to the maximum when cooking hash browns. They weren’t quite done after the recommended quarter of an hour, but another couple of minutes finished them off to perfection. This air fryer cooked superb hash browns, but it delivered literally the best chips I’ve ever cooked at home – evenly browned, deliciously crispy, and fluffy in the middle.
I also used the T22 to cook meat and vegetarian sausages, and tried it out on corn on the cob. It performed well on all foods, cooking very evenly provided I remembered to turn, shake or redistribute food at least once or twice during cooking. The only misfire was when I tried to cook thinner chips at the same setting I’d used for a bigger batch of thick, crinkle cut chips – I forgot to check them towards the end and they came out overdone.
The T22 is fairly quiet. I measured 49.2dB from 15cm away, and just 33.3dB from a metre. It’s easy to continue a conversation while it’s running without even having to raise your voice. Like other fryers, there’s a hot breeze from the back, but it won’t heat up your entire kitchen unless you’re using it for a long shift.
Like other air fryers, this one generally uses less energy than an oven – partly because its heating element has a lower rating, and partly because it gets up to temperature more quickly. I measured a peak of 1,686 watts in use. When heating at 170°C for 12 minutes it consumed just 0.14 kilowatt hours (kWh), equivalent to about 4p if you pay 30p per kWh for electricity.
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Should you buy it?
If you want a large-ish air fryer that performs well across a lot of foods, this is a great choice.
If you’re not bothered about smart features, or you want a device that’s slightly easier to control look elsewhere.
Final Thoughts
Ignore the smart controls for a moment, this is a reasonably large air fryer that does a great job on almost anything you can throw at it. That it’s not particularly expensive only helps to recommend it. It’s a nice bonus that you can also operate or schedule it from an app – and some users may even find that easier. Like the T21 before it, the Proscenic T22 is a great budget air fryer for a family. Not everyone will appreciate its smart controls, but you’ll get excellent results with or without them. If you want a larger capacity or wider range of features, check out our guide to the best air fryers.
How we test
Unlike other sites, we test every air fryer we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as our main air fryer for the review period
We cook real food in each air fryer, making chips, frying sausages and cooking frozen hash browns. This lets us compare quality between each air fryer that we test.
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FAQs
No – you don’t need to connect this to your network or bother with the app if you don’t want to. You’ll miss out on the ability to schedule the fryer, but otherwise you can use all its features.
Potentially. Air fryers are smaller, so they’re quicker to heat up, plus their heating elements draw less electricity. You’re likely to save energy compared to cooking identical food in the oven, but you can fit much more in an oven – for big meals like the Sunday roast, your oven might prove cheaper to run.
It can be. You’ll generally use less fat, and much of the oil will pool below the cooking tray.
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Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
