Making French Toast In An Air Fryer May Be A Game Changer

When it comes to breakfast foods, there's nothing quite like French toast. The sweet treat can kick any morning meal up a notch, and the addition of toppings like fruit and whipped cream allows diners to truly make the dish their own.

Despite its deliciousness, cooking French toast can sometimes be a bit of a hassle. After you've made a liquid mixture and soaked your bread in it, you typically have to fry that bread in a frying pan. It sounds like an easy enough proposition, but getting the right amount of heat on both sides of the bread can sometimes be challenging, resulting in a toast that's overdone and burnt or underdone with a soggy, uncooked center.

One quick and easy way to cook perfect French toast every time? Your air fryer. The countertop appliance handles the task so well that an Insider writer who tested the method went as far as to say that it's the only way they'll be cooking the dessert-y breakfast going forward.

Classic French toast can be made in a variety of different ways, but the basic concept is the same: slices of bread (thick slices, preferably) soaked in milk, spices (typically vanilla and cinnamon), and egg, that get caramelized in a frying pan.

Making French toast in an air fryer is done roughly the same as the conventional way. The difference might come in the size of your toast. Most air fryers offer a little less real estate than your standard frying pan or baking sheet. If your air fryer is on the smaller side you'll want to cut your bread up into strips and make something a little closer to French toast sticks rather than full slices of bread.

Insider advocates for cutting the bread into three strips and then dipping each one in a butter, milk, egg, and vanilla mixture before sprinkling the sticks with a combination of cinnamon and sugar. Once in the air fryer basket and spaced apart so as not to crowd together, the French toast is cooked for eight minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. The resulting sticks should have a crispy exterior thanks to the added sugar (and might not even need maple syrup thanks to their innate sweetness).

Insider isn't the first to try French toast in an air fryer. TikTok user @chef_nene1 also cooks their French toast at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 8 minutes in the air fryer, but cooks full slices rather than sticks. Your ability to do that is somewhat determined by your air fryer size. Larger models will be able to get as many as four whole slices into the same basket. They also recommend spraying the basket and the top of the toast with cooking spray, something Insider opted not to do.

TikToker @arimonika also makes French toast sticks, but they pre-cook the bread for three minutes before adding the egg mixture to avoid soggy bread. They also top their sticks with a finishing touch of cinnamon and sugar rather than adding it before cooking. Meanwhile, YouTube user Remis World posted possibly the gauntlet of air fryer French toast options, a version of the dish similar to eggs-in-the-basket where the center of the bread is filled with banana slices.

If you have an air fryer at home, give it a try the next time you're craving French toast. Who knows, with this easy hack you might find yourself making the filling breakfast a lot more often.