Thanksgiving is more than just significant for its (dubious) historical import. It’s also more than just a heartwarming celebration of family, gratitude and abundance.
No, the true significance of Thanksgiving is in its display of extreme logistics: not only where to seat feuding family members, but how to cook a giant bird and about a dozen side dishes with only one oven and a quartet of stovetop burners. It is a triumph of the human spirit over limitations of space, made exponentially more difficult by myriad cooking times and temperatures.
It isn’t only the oven that has an epic to-do list on Thanksgiving. To help lessen the burden and free up space either in the oven or on the stove, your air fryer can take on several dishes. Since you can plug it in literally anywhere, it might even allow you to move some prep out of the kitchen if space is at a premium.
If used strategically, I’d go so far as to say that there’s just about nothing on the classic Thanksgiving menu that the air fryer can’t do for you. Kitchen under construction? Contemplating a hotel room on Turkey Day? Just can’t be bothered to let the oven preheat this year?
Here are six ways to utilize your air fryer at Thanksgiving, making room in the oven or on the stovetop.
Roasted vegetables
The air fryer makes crispy Brussels — just how I like them.
Look, roasted veggies might be a Thanksgiving throwaway in your household, but you know you’re making them anyhow: Brussels sprouts or asparagus as a pop of green among an almost monochromatic beige spread, or maybe swapping in a more adult version of something to check the starchy orange vegetable box for the marshmallow-topped sweet potato casserole. Roasted veggies aren’t meant to be a showstopper, just there for the Thanksgiving gathering. So let them hang out in the air fryer.
No matter the veg in question, for the best results, toss your chopped vegetables in a light amount of oil before placing them in the air fryer basket. Nonstick spray isn’t recommended in the already nonstick air fryer environment, and a slight amount of oil is needed to achieve a richer flavor and texture. (Thanksgiving is not the time to get silly about grams of fat anyway.)
Arrange your veggies in a single layer to maximize caramelization potential and prevent inadvertent steaming. Fresh herbs can get a bit blasted in the high winds of the air fryer environment, so simply season your vegetables with salt and pepper and save any other adornments for a quick toss after cooking.
Stuffing
You can’t make stuffing this crispy in the oven without drying out the insides.
The air fryer is essentially a convection oven, so anything that can be baked and fits inside your air fryer’s basket or chamber is fair game. A dish that can benefit from a little crispier texture, such as stuffing, is a perfect candidate for this. Whether you’re making simple stuffing from a box or from an heirloom sausage/chestnut/cornbread recipe matters not. In the air fryer, if it fits, it fries. (That’s “fries” — sort of — in Italian.)
A round, deep cake pan is a good starting point for a baking dish that will likely fit inside your air fryer. (I made stuffing for six people, with enough for leftovers, in a deep 6-inch pan.) For best results, adjust your recipe for the air fryer by reducing the temperature setting by 25 or 50 degrees, and reduce the cooking time by about 25% to start. Cover with aluminum foil for the majority of the cooking time, and remove for the last 5 to 10 minutes if you want to get some nice crispiness in the top stuffing layer. After cooking, use a food thermometer to ensure that the center of your stuffing reaches 165 degrees Fahrenheit, especially if your recipe calls for eggs to bind it together.
Mashed potatoes
After roasting, potatoes are cooked and skin is easy to peel.
Yes, really. There’s no ancient Thanksgiving law that necessitates your potatoes must be boiled in water before mashing. Any method that sufficiently cooks them through will soften them enough to mash — and that includes air frying. The cooked potatoes will inherently lack some of the moisture that boiling them on the stovetop would achieve, but this is just an excuse to use extra butter and milk, or better yet, cream or sour cream, to mash them into the desired consistency. These are not your average weeknight mashed potatoes; these are Thanksgiving mashed potatoes, so let decadence be your guide.
For air fryer mashed potatoes, you’re essentially baking potatoes with their skins on, and making a few pokes with a fork to help the cooking along. You want to use whole potatoes here to ensure maximum “mashability” after the cooking; otherwise, see “roasted vegetables” above. For best results, try to use as many evenly sized potatoes as possible.
After about 30 minutes of air frying and a moment to cool slightly, the potato skins will easily come off and the potatoes will be ready for mashing. They will also take on a somewhat roasted flavor, which, when enhanced with the requisite dairy product(s), will also enhance your Thanksgiving dinner.
Cranberry sauce
Cranberries awaiting their air fryer fate.
If you’re firmly on the team of canned cranberry for reasons you can actually elucidate, please feel free to move along. But if you’ve always used canned cranberry sauce by default for your Thanksgiving table, and not out of any kind of loyalty to the product itself, let this also be a proclamation that cranberry sauce is one of the easiest things to make from scratch.
Cranberries are a Thanksgiving gift. They bring a bright pop of color and flavor, and they come complete with their own sugar, acid and pectin, the magical element that enables fruit to gel. Other ingredients such as sugar, citrus, spice or aromatics are certainly recommended here, but it takes very little besides heat to transform cranberries into cranberry sauce. Your air fryer has the heat required for this job as well.
Smush any unexploded cranberries with a potato masher.
Like with stuffing, you will need a vessel in which to make air fryer cranberry sauce — the same small cake pan used above will also work here. You will also need to keep the cranberry mixture covered with foil the entire time during cooking, as cranberries can explode when heated, much like popcorn. It takes just 25 to 30 minutes to turn cranberries into sauce in the air fryer, using your preferred recipe. After cooking, simply mash any unexploded berries with a potato masher. The cranberry sauce will continue to thicken as it cools.
Duck breasts
Hear me out: There’s something inherently unfair about making turkey the centerpiece of Thanksgiving. Roasting a whole bird is not the kind of thing you get to often practice during the year, so you get one chance to get it right. Taking up all the oven’s space, and most of your day, the turkey is all the more disappointing if (when) it doesn’t come out perfectly.
My solution has always been duck breasts: more flavorful, more forgiving, equally special-occasion-worthy and they pair well with everything on the table that you’d usually serve beside the turkey. You may not have duck breasts regularly on the menu, but you’re more likely to have a habit of sauteeing small proteins than you are of roasting entire animals. Plus? They take like 15 minutes to cook. And? You can totally do them in the air fryer.
For best results, score the skin down to the meat layer and cook skin-side up for about 12-15 minutes to achieve the desired doneness. The only drawback to air fryer duck breasts is that achieving truly crispy skin requires a turn on the stovetop before finishing in the air fryer. However, since you’re going to serve them along with piles of stuffing, mashed potatoes and other casseroles, and douse them all with gravy, it may not matter much.
Reheating
The air fryer is standing by to reheat leftovers or a plate for latecomers.
If all else fails, at the very least, your air fryer is on hand exactly for the moments when someone shows up with an unexpected dish that needs warming.
