Air Frying Is The Superior Way To Bake Cookies

I am pretty fussy about cookies. I like them to have that bakery-level softness while maintaining a satisfyingly crisp exterior; I want thick, gooey cookies, ideally eaten warm with melted chocolate and sea flakes.

There are, of course, steps you can take to ensure these features. Resting cookie dough overnight helps to prevent the biscuits from spreading in the oven, which I find leaves them too thin.

And adding some inverted sugars, like golden or maple syrup, alongside granulated kinds goes a long way to keeping them sumptuously soft.

Personally, I swear by the New York Times’ recipe, though I replace about 10g of the brown sugar with maple syrup.

I’ve been making a batch on the weekend, freezing the dough, and baking one in the oven nightly for the past couple of weeks. But recently, partly because baking takes so long and partly because I hated using that much energy on a single biscuit, I switched appliances.

The results were gooier, crisper, faster, and easier to make; I haven’t gone back since.

Though I was happy with the results from my oven, I found that the air fryer left a much crisper top layer on the brownies with a truly gooey underneath. It makes them a little like a very good brownie.

When I bake them in the oven, meanwhile, they often end up getting a little caught and chewy on the ends. My oven probably heats up too slowly, which would explain the thin, lacy edges, where sugar melts into a slightly too hard layer, and the heat doesn’t blast the fat quickly enough to prevent spreading.

Not so with the air fryer, which cooks the cookie much faster (I put a frozen cookie in at 150°C for about 11 minutes, vs the oven’s 20 minutes plus preheating time).

And because air circulates in a much smaller area in my air fryer than it does in the oven, I feel it makes the craggy parts of my cookie crunchier and more golden while still maintaining a fudgy middle.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that baking legend Jane’s Patisserie likes the trick, too.

I wouldn’t go that far. I’m in a specific situation here: I cook one or two cookies at a time, and I much prefer warm cookies to cooled ones. I also make taller cookies, and I think a thinner one could run a little too crisp quite quickly.

If you’re less interested in gooeiness and/or are cooking a lot of cookies at once, an oven will almost certainly be your best bet. I would not, for instance, use this for a bake sale.

But I probably would lob a huge scoop of cookie dough into my air fryer for something like a movie night dessert or a post-dinner cookie cake for friends (just be sure to carefully line your basket with baking paper: this is mandatory, of course, no matter what size cookie you’re making).

And I have stuck to the appliance every night since I first tried it. It’s faster, easier to clean, makes it much easier to check the doneness of your cookies, and makes mine taller, gooier, crisper, and more delicious.