Stuffing, dressing, cornbread or sourdough, no matter where you land on the stuffing spectrum, you can save time and oven space this season by relegating stuffing to air fryer. Not to mention the crunchiest stuffing – sorry, dressing – in Thanksgiving history. Air fryer stuffing is a little bit magical and it couldn’t be simpler.

Wait, no air fryer? Here is everything you need to know on countertop ranges and the best to buy in 2024.

Now that we’ve taken care of that. Here’s how to make the quickest, easiest, and crunchiest stuffing of your life.

What You’ll Need for Air Fryer Stuffing

Before you start heating up the air fryer and frying the celery and onions with a quick burst of stuffing, the most important item you’ll need here is a baking dish or a pan that fits in your air fryer basket – maybe something pretty you can serve it in.

This is important: don’t make stuffing directly in the basket of your air fryer. It’s a recipe for the kind of hassle we usually try to avoid at big family dinners.

You can basically use any stuffing recipe you like, making sure to scale it to the size of your baking dish. My air fryer is about as small as it gets, but a six-inch round cake pan with about two inches deep fits perfectly and easily makes about four servings, probably five when you consider all the other carbohydrates served at Thanksgiving.

Some ceramic dishes will work, as long as they are heat resistant, as will disposable aluminum baking dishes. Your only real limitation is the size of your air fryer. If you have a family-sized appliance, there’s no reason why you can’t make stuffing for an entire family in your air fryer.

I went the route of stuffing doctored boxes for this experiment, upgrading a bunch of Stove Top Cornbread Stuffing mix with celery, onions, sausage and apple. The dry components were moistened with a mixture of half-and-half chicken broth, melted butter, and one egg. For a creamier stuffing, you will need to start with the mixture quite wet. Be sure to give it time to rest and hydrate before cooking.

The Benefits of Air Fryer Stuffing

One of the big challenges of a big holiday dinner is making room for everything to cook and come out hot at the same time. The air fryer can help you. Use smaller devices like your toaster oven, microwave, and yes, even your air fryer, can free up space for other projects. When you have eight or more dishes working at the same time, not only do you save space in your oven, but in theory you can also save space on the kitchen counter since the air fryer is essentially mobile.

The stuffing mixture can be prepared well in advance, even a few days, so that when the time is right, you can plug in the air fryer anywhere in your house that has electricity. (I once put the Thanksgiving turkey on my bedroom floor due to lack of kitchen space, and when I tested bread machines for CNETI had several running through every room of my house. So, as a small apartment dweller, I’m all for thinking outside of the kitchen.)

In addition to the logistical advantages, the air fryer cooks the stuffing quickly and produces a result that is soft on the inside and crispy on the outside. I dare say another duality of Thanksgiving is between the crunchy stuffing and the stuffing that almost looks like bread pudding. With an air fryer, you can easily have both in one go.

Cooking Stuffing in the Air Fryer

Once your stuffing mixture is assembled in your air fryer sized cooking container, which, again, can be done in advance, you will cover it and cook it first for about 15 minutes at 350 degrees. This should fit most wide, shallow pans that will work in an air fryer.

Depending on how snug your dish fits into the air fryer basket, you may need tongs or another instrument to remove it. Since the air fryer doesn’t emit heat when the drawer is open the same way an oven does, it’s easy to forget that its contents are hot. Remove the coating and cook for another five to 10 minutes to achieve a crispy exterior. The convection action and proximity of the air fryer do this extremely efficiently. For a slightly crispy top on your stuffing, the last step can move closer to the five minute mark. For a crispy stuffing, 10 minutes will be enough.

For my attempt at testing air fryer stuffing, the initial 15 minute cooking time was followed by a full 10 minutes uncovered, resulting in a golden brown result with a bit of satisfying crunch and a soft interior.

The Verdict on Air Fryer Stuffing

The only difficult part of making the stuffing in the air fryer, at least for me, was finding a suitable dish that could work within the confines of my very small appliance. From there, it couldn’t have been simpler, and the result was as successful as anything that has ever come out of an oven in my Thanksgiving history. Since it’s also extremely easy to make the stuffing in a smaller portion than I normally would, air fryer stuffing might just make an appearance at my table a lot more often than Thanksgiving.