I Cooked Chinese Food in an Air Fryer for a Week, and Here's What Happened

This inauthentic but crowd-pleasing Chinese dish is a good candidate for air-frying. The chicken, fried but not necessarily crunchy, is doused in a soy-garlic-sugar sauce, and it’s the latter that really makes this dish. For this experiment, I loosely followed a recipe on a blog called CJ Eats Recipes. There were more steps than I typically have patience for, but the results were impressive. I tend to overcook meat when I stir-fry, but with an air fryer, each bite of chicken was juicy, even as the skin held up to the sauce and didn’t get soggy.

But because my air fryer holds just 3 quarts, I had to divide the cut chicken thighs into three batches. That was a drag, and as a result, I probably won’t make this dish in an air fryer again until I upgrade to a larger-capacity model. Still, I loved that the dish tasted healthier than takeout (in a good way), and there was no scorched oversized wok to clean at the end of the meal.

I’ve never made this dish from scratch, but the best restaurant version I’ve had has always been delicately crisped and assertively flavored. My air-fryer attempt wasn’t exactly that. I opted for an air-fryer recipe from the Blue Jean Chef blog, and improvised with red bell peppers and more garlic. The resulting coating, a cornstarch-flour mix, lacked that elusive crackle but had a crunchy texture that was pleasing enough for me to want to try it again. 

This simple dish is made even simpler with an air fryer and a bag of prewashed, presnipped green beans. I used a recipe from New York Times Cooking, minus the red pepper flakes because I don’t typically eat them that way. (You can find similar recipes all over the internet, like these from Pickled Plum and Lakes and Lattes.) I coated the beans in a quick vinegar-olive-oil mixture, sprinkled on salt and pepper, and tossed them into the air fryer. In minutes, the beans took on a satisfying char and a tender texture, though not that rich flavor you’d get from cooking over oil-splattering high heat.

Still, I intend to go back to this method again and again because of the vast savings in not only effort but also money. Dry-fried green beans now cost $18.95 at my local Chinese restaurant, while a bag of snipped green beans from my online supermarket costs only $2.99, and I usually already have garlic and condiments on hand.

This is a dish I typically make at home by frying slabs of tofu in a pan. But I’m often frustrated when I flip them too soon, inadvertently tearing off the skin and leaving a pan that needs to be scraped clean, not to mention a tofu dish with no bite.

The air fryer makes this task foolproof, though the tofu (from a recipe I found on a tofu blog) didn’t brown nearly as much as it would have in a pan. Next time, I might cheat with a bit of panko for crunch, but overall, it proved to be an easy-to-make dish worth adding to the rotation.

I haven’t made dumplings from scratch because it’s easier to buy them frozen and simply boil them at home. You can eat them right out of the pot once cooked (as I do) or then fry them in a pan (as everyone else in my household prefers). Many supermarket brands allow you to go straight from freezer to pan. Either way, this entails keeping an eye on each dumpling to avoid burning, while resisting the urge to flip too soon and tear open your shell. An air fryer seemed to be the perfect way to prevent this from happening.

To test my hunch, I bought a 12-pack of raw pork-and-chive dumplings from Dumpling Daughter, available at my local supermarket. These dumplings require boiling and then pan-frying. I put six directly into the air fryer (at 390 degrees for about 12 minutes, as directed by the guidebook that came with my air fryer) and six into a pot of boiling water until cooked through, followed by air frying (at 390° F for about 3 minutes) instead of pan-frying. How great would it be if we could all skip the boiling, right?

I’m sad to report that if you want more authentic-tasting fried dumplings, the boiling is crucial, yielding a more delicate browning, not unlike what you’d get from laboring over the stove. The others were still tasty, but more like little empanadas.

I was pretty pleased with the results from my compact air fryer. But given that the nicest part about Chinese food is serving it family-style and making enough for leftovers, I’d recommend a model with a larger capacity if you have the counter space. Here are three high-performing options, each with at least a 5-quart capacity based on our testers’ measurements. To learn about their features and how they perform in our tests—and to view even more models—check out our comprehensive air-fryer ratings.