Can You Make Pizza In An Air Fryer?

When you're craving homemade pizza, you most likely head straight for the oven. Sure, you can preheat it to its hottest temperature, let it take too long to get there, then mosey on with your pizza making. But what if you don't want to warm up the whole house or wait so long to be able to cook your dish? Surprisingly, it's pretty easy to cook that pizza in the air fryer, which takes much less preheat time and won't leave the whole kitchen feeling way too warm.

The biggest key to making air fryer pizza is understanding your pizza dough's thickness. If you're going for thick-crust, you'll have to cook the pizza in a pan — otherwise, it could sink through the holes in the basket while it heats. But thin crust pizza can do well with just a sheet of parchment paper between it and the fryer basket. And when it comes to toppings, don't add them too early, or they'll burn while the pizza cooks.

When the air fryer cooks food, it heats it convection style, meaning hot air circulates around the food to cook it through. But during that process, the exterior becomes nice and crispy, mimicking an oil-fried texture. When you cook pizza in the air fryer, the dough needs more time to thoroughly cook than the toppings. Let the dough cook part-way through before adding any toppings. Otherwise, the toppings will crisp to the point of burning while the dough is still too soft.

Air fryer pizza only takes about 10 minutes to cook, especially if the crust is on the thinner side. To get a crispy crust, let the dough cook on its own for around three minutes, just so it can get ahead in the process (don't add the pizza sauce or cheese yet, either). Then, open the fryer, top your pizza with sauce, cheese, and toppings, and let it cook for the remaining seven minutes. The end result is a crispy, perfectly-cooked pizza — and you didn't even have to preheat the oven.