Karaca Air Pro Cook Review: More than just an air fryer

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A smart-looking, capable multi-cooker.

Extra functions can feel like gimmicky add-ons, but in the Karaca Air Pro Cook they’re genuinely useful, allowing you to stew a dish during the day, air fry some chips in the evening, and whip up freshly made yoghurt or dried fruit overnight for tomorrow. This, combined with a labelled control panel and a choice of colours, brings plenty to the table that other air fryers don't. The only issues could be the capacity. At just 4 litres, this air fryer is probably not enough for a larger family – and the lack of cooking and recipe guidance for getting the most from it.

Karaca only arrived in the UK at the end of 2022, so you could easily be forgiven for not recognising the name. Its small appliances, however, are well worth getting to know, including this reasonably-priced, good-sized air fryer.

Designed and made in Turkey, it features several points of difference from the run-of-the-mill air fryers, including a choice of colours, dedicated yoghurt-making and fruit and veg dehydrating programmes, plus the ability to cook soups, stews and sauces using its own stew pot. All of which makes it a multifunctional marvel in the kitchen for all meals of the day.

While some air fryers have opted for icons – sometimes obvious, sometimes an enigma – Karaca's Air Pro Cook spells out pretty much everything on its front panel. Its six presets have named buttons (stew, oven/grill, reheat, yoghurt, air fry, dehydrate), as do the time and temperature controls, ranging from a versatile 40-210°C and up to 12 hours, so you can dry out fruit as well as give food a fierce blast of heat.

The design is a bit messy, but forgivable, considering that they surround a large visible display for the time and temperature, which is easily seen from metres away. Selecting a preset defaults to showing the selected temperature, but the time can only be displayed by starting a cook or using the time adjustment buttons. You can also toggle the time and temperature as the air fryer cooks.

Inside the drawer, there's a crisper plate for air frying and baking, as well as a stew pot and splash-proof lid for stewing and yoghurt making. This latter accessory is on the small side but thoughtfully designed with a slim handle on the pot, so getting it in and out of the drawer is simple.

Fortunately, the drawer, pot and lid are dishwasher safe. Cleaning by hand was a little more tiresome, as grease tended to weld itself to the inside of the drawer but came off eventually. There's also a two-year guarantee and a choice of colours: Starlight (cream), Ruby and Space Grey Black.

Perhaps the most perplexing element of the Karaca Air Pro Cook is that while the air fryer provides fantastic cooking versatility, there's next to no guidance in the instructions as to ideal capacities for different foods, or recipes you can make to get started. You’re effectively on your own, which is fine for a batch of chips but less than ideal for yoghurt making and stewing, and means you may end up buying a multi-functional machine and not getting the most out of it.

Using the air fry programme – 20 mins at 200°C – I cooked peeled, rinsed and patted dry pieces of potato that had been lightly tossed in oil. The suggested preheat is three minutes from cold so I added that on before placing the chips in the drawer on top of the crisper plate. Thankfully, there's a table in the instructions listing the potential temperature and time duration for each programme, so in theory you can air fry for up to an hour using the preset.

One slight concern is that the body of the machine grew very hot on this setting, so it's advisable to put on oven gloves when opening and closing the drawer to shake food. Halfway through, the chips had made good progress by starting to brown, while by the end of cooking, the browning was well-distributed throughout the batch. Smaller pieces were very crispy at the ends, with only one or two pieces still pale but these were in the minority. Later on, I used the handy reheat setting (170°C) to refresh the batch for a few minutes, which worked well as it warmed the chips up without drying them out.

Next, I used the oven/grill preset to cook hash browns from frozen. The basket easily accommodated four. There's no guidance for cooking from frozen, other than refer to the instructions on the packet, but this programme option seemed a good one to try. It offered 190°C for 15 minutes, which proved to be sufficient for the hash browns. They emerged very crispy and golden brown, while still soft enough in the middle and not dry.

There was no preset for meat, fish or poultry, so I chose manual cooking for a steak, opting for 180°C for 10 minutes after preheating. I turned the meat halfway through as heat didn't seem to be penetrating the underside as well as I’d hoped.

By the time cooking time had elapsed, the steak was browned on the outside, but was still quite pink inside once cut open. This would have suited someone who prefers their meat medium rare, but would need additional cooking time for a greater level of doneness.

Once the machine had cooled sufficiently, I set about making yoghurt. While the air fryer has the potential to heat the milk to a high temperature before cooling it, the default setting for the programme is 45°C – necessary for fermenting it, but not for removing unwanted microbes and thickening the curd – so I heated the milk on the hob before cooling it and adding a few spoons of live yoghurt.

I transferred the milk/yoghurt mixture to the stew pot, added the lid and placed directly in the drawer before running the programme for its default time of eight hours. The result was a beautifully thick set yoghurt – definitely a good reason to choose this machine over a single-function yoghurt maker.

You plan to do more than air fry and bake. Karaca's Air Pro Cook lends itself to preparing a wider variety of dishes, making it great for those who like to experiment.

You’re cooking large amounts on a regular basis. The smaller capacity of this machine could prove frustrating over time.

Karaca's Air Pro Cook has bags of appeal if you want your air fryer to be able to do more, making it an excellent choice for smaller households, or those who’d prefer not to have multiple appliances taking up worktop space. And while its presets could use more variation – there's not a massive difference between air fry and stew, for example, yet meat and poultry are missing – in general, the versatility is far better than that offered by many air fryers.

The lack of cooking guidance is jarring, however, meaning that if it's your first air fryer, you may end up doing a fair amount of testing and adjusting before you work out the best settings for different dishes. For a more beginner-friendly air fryer, check out the Ninja Air Fryer Max, which has a recipe book.

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.

It takes up to 4-litres of food, so good for one or two people; larger families may prefer a bigger model.

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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.

Founded in 2003, Trusted Reviews exists to give our readers thorough, unbiased and independent advice on what to buy.

Today, we have millions of users a month from around the world, and assess more than 1,000 products a year.

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.

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.