Can You Cook Toast in your Air Fryer?

Welcome back to Air Fryer Bro. Today we are talking about toast….you know that whole ‘cooking bread’ thing that we all love to do. Growing up we always had a toaster in our kitchen, but if you have an air fryer can you cook your toast there instead? Read on if you are interested to find out!

Is It Possible to Cook Toast in an Air Fryer?

Yes, the intense hot air of an air fryer will work for cooking toast. However, think about how a toaster would turn bread into toast. The intense heating element is very close to the bread itself, telling me that toast requires a close proximity to the heat source for best results. Yes, an air fryer has intense hot air but your bread is going to be much further away from the heating elements and therefore I wouldn’t expect this to be the best way to cook toast.

How to Cook Toast in an Air fryer?

I am not going to insult your intelligence and make this post a recipe for how to cook toast in an air fryer 🙂 When was the last time you looked at a recipe for making toast?

However, I will tell you the most important factors for cooking toast in your air fryer well.

Air Flow

Make sure you place your bread inside your air fryer so that the hot air can flow all around it. This will help make sure your bread is more evenly toasted. Do not use a solid baking tray or anything that the hot air can’t flow through. The less resistance this air has inside your air fryer, the better your toast will cook.

Flipping

This will vary from air fryer to air fryer, but for my particular model I find that flipping my bread halfway through its cook time will bring the best results. This is something you should experiment with yourself. For example, some air fryer ovens won’t need you to flip to brown both sides.

Pin Your Bread Down

I feel like a lot of people don’t realize that it’s almost like a typhoon of hot air going on inside their air fryer! Most air fryers have a powerful fan to aggressively circulate hot air around the cooking compartment and make the whole air fryer concept work.

What this means when it comes to bread is make sure to pin that sucker down or secure it in some way. Trust me, if you don’t you will end up with bread flying around that thing and possibly getting caught in the heating element (fire hazard right there).

The method I would recommend is getting two racks to place on either side of the bread. The weight of the rack on top will stop it moving.

If you are making a toasted sandwich, you could put toothpicks through the whole sandwich to combine it all together and mean it is heavy enough to withstand the strength of the fan.

The type of racks I am talking about are pictured below, simply click the image to take a look at them over at Amazon.

Should You Cook Toast in an Air Fryer?

Toaster VS Air Fryer

Personally, I prefer the toast you get out of a toaster over that I have personally made in an air fryer. The toast from an air fryer gets excessively dried out by the hot air and just doesn’t taste quite as good to me. It’s still pretty good, but just not quite up to what I would get out of a toaster.

So if you can have a toaster in your kitchen, this would be what I would go for. However, if you don’t have any other way to cook toast, you can certainly more than get by with an air fryer.

The other question is around efficiency. How does an air fryer compare to a toaster here?

From my air fryer research project, I would say that the average wattage of an air fryer is around 1500 watts. A typical toaster, on the other hand, would typically be rated at around 1000 watts.

The cooking time is typically the same for both appliances, usually being around three minutes, but the higher wattage rating of the air fryer means it is using more energy.

Using the excellent Sust-IT energy calculator, you can see that using the air fryer for 3 minutes costs you 79c whilst using a toaster for the same time costs you only 53c. This is using an outdated energy price from 2018, but you get the idea. Just be aware of this before you use your air fryer for toast.

The Air Fryer Bro Method of Cooking Toast in my Air Fryer!

• Put the bread in the air fryer
• Make sure there is good air flow around the bread
• Place an extra rack over the top of the bread to stop it moving around
• Set temperature to 392 Fahrenheit or 200 degrees Celsius
• Cook for 3 minutes (flipping the bread halfway through the cook time)
• Hey presto, air fried toast!

Do I Make my Toast in an Air Fryer?

I want to wrap up by saying that for me personally it is possible to make toast in an air fryer, but I find the toast is too dry and the electricity usage is too high to do this on a regular basis. If it is your only way to cook toast (and you are desperate) then go right ahead. Otherwise, stick to a toaster, that’s what it was designed for after all 🙂

Have you had any experiences with making toast in your air fryer? We would love to hear all about them in the comments section below.