Beautiful Air Fryer by Drew Barrymore Review

The Beautiful by Barrymore is 6.1" by 10.4" by 7.4" and holds a six-quart basket. Despite its smaller stature, this air fryer packs a punch and can cook a variety of foods to perfection, offering extra crunchy onion rings and especially soft, tender chicken. The sleek black and gold look is appealing to many, making it a nice appliance to leave on your countertop; it isn't named beautiful without reason.

Performance Comparison

Cooking Performance

During our performance assessment, we cook and taste test sweet potato fries, onion rings, donuts, chicken breasts, and tater tots while evaluating their texture, evenness, and cook time. We take the time to prep each food item the same way, ensuring a fair judgment. The Beautiful cooks evenly and in a timely fashion and only struggles a smidgin with creating the desired texture.

The Beautiful is very versatile in its abilities. The onion rings and tots are cooked thoroughly and evenly inside while remaining crunchy on the outside. The high points are a bit brown, but we quite like them this way. Similarly, the donuts remain moist and squishy in the middle with a crisp outer layer. Chicken is completely cooked within the recommended time and turns out very juicy and flavorful.

One consistent theme across most of the options we tested is the struggle to crisp sweet potato fries properly. The Barrymore cooks the fries evening and quickly but fails to brown the outside the way a deep fryer would. When stacked up against the rest of the options in our fleet, its texture performance is average. If perfectly crispy sweet potato fries are your bread and butter, then you may want to look elsewhere, but the Beautiful is an overall high-performing piece of cookware.

User Friendliness

These days cookware can be overly complicated. Having a simple and easy-to-use interface goes a long way. On the flip side, an overly simplified option may not meet all your cooking needs, so versatility is another contributing factor to this metric. Lastly, basket accessibility can cause a surprising amount of frustration, so we are sure to take that into consideration as well.

The straightforward digital interface is intuitive and precise. There are only a few options, and they are clearly labelled. The temperature, time, start/pause, presets, and power buttons are located on the front of the device. Since all these controls are touchscreens, they occasionally do not register when pressed, but this seldom happened during our testing. The Beautiful has four different presets (Air Fry, Roast, Reheat, Dehydrate). It is important to note that you can change the time and temperature of these presets, which gives the user a little more versatility in their cooking.

The temperature ranges from 70°F - 400°F range and can be adjusted in increments of 5°, giving the user a good amount of control. The timer stops at one hour, which can be a little irritating if you are trying to cook something for longer, but it also helps ensure that nothing gets overcooked. The basket is so easy to remove that you can do it one-handed while the other taste tests your chicken wings.

Ease of Cleaning

Like most speciality kitchen appliances, the air fryer is meant to offer convenience. Most of them consist of a drawer and some kind of basket or mesh for oil to drip through, which can be very difficult to wash thoroughly. During our ease of cleaning testing, we pay attention to how easily the appliance can be wiped down and how difficult it is to wash. Factors like non-stick material, the ability to remove baskets, and the size of the holes in the basket contribute heavily to the amount of effort you have to put into cleaning your air fryer.

The Beautiful consists of a very simple build. There are only two parts that you will need to clean, and they can be easily taken apart. The main basket and drainage platform are coated generously with non-stick material, making a quick wipe down very easy. The drainage platform covers the entire bottom of the air fryer and has a small but easy-to-grab handle for removal. The entire basket barely needs soap and water to wash away any oil or crumbs, making the Beautiful one of the easiest to clean in our test suite.

Temperature Accuracy

We set the Beautiful to various temps and double-check with our own thermometer to test temperature accuracy. The options in our test suite vary in accuracy.

This air fryer ranges from 170°F - 400°F range and is in 5°F increments. We test each device at 300°F, 350°F, 375°F, and 400°F. The Beautiful is spot on at all of them except for 300°F, which was roughly 10°F too cool.

Value

The Beautiful is a well-rounded device at a more-than-fair price. It cooks most food evenly, with the appropriate crisp or crunch on the outer layer. It does so in a timely and accurate fashion. It is nice looking and not too big for most countertops. It's also easy to clean and versatile. When you consider all of these factors, this air fryer provides exceptional value.

Conclusion

From juicy chicken to crunchy onion rings, and soft, sweet donuts, the Beautiful by Barrymore proves to be an efficient and versatile piece of kitchen equipment. It is on the smaller side, which is great for storage reasons but can only yield so much at one time. It is easy to use and even easier to clean, making the entire experience hassle-free. If you are looking for a compact, versatile air fryer on a budget, the Beautiful 6-Quart will leave you feeling like you got the best bang for your buck.