I know, I know. It seems like these days you can’t escape the frenzied adulation for the now-omnipresent air fryer.
Cooking Tips
Hear Me Out: You Should Bake Your Cookies in an Air Fryer
A small batch of soft and crispy chocolate chip cookies is a gift from your air fryer to you.
By Published Feb. 3, 2023
From our fan-favorite Air-Fryer French Fries to Air-Fryer Cheesecake (yep, it’s a thing), recipes for this crowd-pleasing appliance are abundant.
And I am here to inform you that your baked goods can benefit from it just as much as your salmon fillets and crispy brussels sprouts do.
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So why is an air fryer perfect for baking cookies? Here are just a few reasons.
- It’s convenient. I don’t know about you, but I tend to forget to preheat my oven until right before I’m about to use it. When it comes to an air fryer, there’s absolutely no preheating time needed.
- It’s a breeze for small-batch cooking. For those moments when you only want a few chocolate chip cookies with minimal prep time (hello, midnight sugar cravings), the air fryer is your best friend, with the perfect capacity for just a couple of delicious morsels.
- It results in a textural dream. Air-fryer cookies have a considerably crispier profile than your average oven-baked cookie, with a well-browned exterior, without compromising the soft, gooey center we all love about a decadently chunky cookie.
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One thing to keep in mind is that depending on your model of air fryer, you’ll likely experience small variances in how your cookie bakes. Nevertheless, I found that baking my cookies at 325 degrees for 10-12 minutes produced the best results.
A few tips for succesful cookie air frying:
- Be sure to line your fryer basket with parchment paper or an air-fryer liner. If using parchment paper, you can easily remove the basket, lay it on top of the parchment, and trace around the bottom to create an outline to cut out and lay in the tray before adding your cookie dough.
- Place your rounds of cookie dough close to the outside of the basket. Since air is constantly rushing around the inside of the air fryer, you'll want to use the cookie dough to weigh down the parchment paper, as it will want to flap up and could squish your cookies, causing them to become misshapen.
- You can use the air fryer for any cookie recipe you want to bake! Just be sure to adjust the temperature—since the air fryer gets a lot hotter a lot quicker, you won’t want to go past 325 degrees, otherwise your cookies will burn.