Ninja Combi review: the budget entry into steam plus air fry in one box

Ninja markets Ninja Combi as a multicooker, air fryer, toaster oven, and steamer combined, and the 14 functions are largely different combinations and durations of the same handful of underlying modes: air fry, bake, roast, broil, dehydrate, and steam, rather than 14 fundamentally different cooking mechanisms. That framing is common across countertop combi appliances and is not unique to Ninja; the air fryer basics guide covers why a function count on any box like this tends to overstate genuine variety.

• Air fry and bake share the same convection element, just at different fan speeds and temperature ranges
• Steam is the mode that separates this from a plain air fryer oven, useful for reheating without drying food out and for vegetables
• It is not a pressure cooker: the catalog listing does not include a pressure function, despite the multicooker name suggesting one

Ninja's specification sheet for the SFP701 lists 14 functions and names steam, air fry, and bake among the core modes, which is a narrower and more honest description than the 14-in-1 marketing number on its own.

A dedicated combi oven built around steam, like Cuisinart CSO-300N or Nuwave Combi, treats steam as the headline function and engineers the reservoir and injection system around getting real oven spring on bread. On Ninja Combi, steam reads more as a supporting mode for reheating leftovers without drying them out and for cooking vegetables gently, rather than a bread-focused feature. The how combi steam ovens work guide explains what separates a genuine steam injection system from a lighter-duty steam mode, and that distinction is the main reason to pick a dedicated steam oven over this one if bread is the priority.

For most kitchens, yes, purely on counter space, since Ninja Combi covers both roles adequately even if it does not excel at either one the way a dedicated machine would. A household that already owns a good basket air fryer like Ninja Max XL and just wants occasional steaming has less to gain, since adding a $250 appliance to replace a function that comes up rarely is a harder case to make than replacing two appliances with one.

On temperature, regardless of which of the 14 named functions produced the heat. The published USDA safe minimum internal temperatures apply the same way in any countertop oven: poultry to 165 F, ground meat to 160 F, whole muscle beef, pork, lamb, and veal to 145 F with a 3 minute rest, and fish to 145 F. The air fryer conversion calculator is a reasonable starting point for translating a standard oven recipe onto this appliance's air fry mode, with the finish always decided by a probe reading rather than the display countdown.

Buy Ninja Combi if the goal is one affordable countertop box that air fries well and steams competently as a bonus, without paying for a dedicated steam oven's bread-focused engineering. Buy Cuisinart CSO-300N instead if bread and precise combo steam-convection cooking are the actual goal, since that is specifically what its higher price is paying for. Buy Combi Wave instead if replacing a microwave is also part of the equation, since that is a function this Ninja does not offer at all.