Burgers are one of the things we order the most when dining out of the house: from fast food, to fast casual and gastropubs, a good or cheap (or hopefully good and cheap) burger hits the spot on so many occasions. What’s interesting when you think about it, is that burgers are also one of the easiest things to make inside the house.
With minimal ingredients and equipment and about 10 minutes, you can sizzle up one of your own with stuff you may already have on hand. If your cheese drawer and refrigerator door shelves look anything like mine, you probably even have a few creative ways to garnish a burger.
Maybe it’s the tendency to overcook a burger, or the tendency to smoke up our kitchens in the process that stops us. What if there was a way to account for both of those things? You don’t have to wait for grill season to home-cook a burger without setting off the smoke alarm, and you can take a little guesswork out of whether that burger will actually come out perfectly medium rare.
Enter, your air fryer.
I’ve been an air fryer acolyte since the moment one came into my life, but its primary employment has always been toward the perfection of frozen, fried items or the occasional piece of salmon. Why I’ve never thought to throw a burger patty in there before now is beyond me, especially when the outcome was so favorable. Here’s all you need to know about cooking a burger in the air fryer for optimal results.
The method
Making a great burger in an air fryer takes almost no skill and requires very little cleanup afterward.
Air fryer burger: consistent results with easy cleanup
Well, that was easy. In both cases the patties cooked evenly, with an outcome that was medium in doneness. (You can easily experiment with your model and ideal burger patty size to find the precise timings for your preferred degree of doneness.) The hot air circulation even managed to produce a bit of caramelized crust on one side. Because I could, even with a small, single-household air fryer, I put in a couple of strips of bacon with the single burger patty, since crispy, spatter-free bacon is another excellent use for an air fryer — not to mention an exceptional burger topping.
With an air fryer, you can’t smash the patties down as easily as you can on a grill or griddle.
The air fryer isn’t perfect when it comes to burgers, and the drawbacks as I experienced are twofold. First, since you can’t really access the patty while it cooks, you’re unable to smash it down in such a way that it doesn’t shrink up significantly while cooking. Since an English muffin is the best burger containment method — I will not be considering opposing viewpoints at this time — this didn’t bother me so much, since the resulting patty fits the intended vessel perfectly. Expect shrinkage when considering the size of your patty before cooking.
Second, if you’re like me and believe that a burger without cheese isn’t worth eating, things get a little more complicated. Because of the air circulation action of the air fryer, it’s hard to anchor cheese on top for a quick melt at the end of the process. My first attempt with a sliced single, an ideal burger cheese — and I am a cheese pro, so don’t come at me — flew off and unhelpfully adhered to the surface of the air fryer drawer.
