Skip The Oven And Cook Chicken Parm This Way For Dinner In Half The Time

Once you've made chicken Parmesan in the air fryer instead of the deep fryer, you'll likely never use any other method. Air fried chicken Parm takes a mere 15 minutes or so of cook time and is unbelievably crispy and light, as opposed to traditional chicken Parm taking up to an hour for cutlets that can be dense, heavy, and coated in grease. As most of us know by this point, air fryers are designed to give food a crisp outer texture with a minimal amount of oil by using intensely concentrated, evenly distributed convection heat.

You can easily use this to your advantage to take chicken Parmesan from a weekend treat to weeknight meal prep. The basic steps to making air fried chicken Parm are similar to making the traditional version. You need thinly pounded chicken cutlets dredged in flour, eggs, and panko bread crumbs. Provided you've preheated your air fryer to the correct temperature (about 375 degrees Fahrenheit), the thin cutlets should cook quickly and evenly.

You'll have to flip them after 5 or 6 minutes to ensure both sides get crispy, but you'd need to do this anyway to add the marinara and mozz. Another clever trick is to make sure your marinara is warm before it goes on the breaded chicken. This not only helps the cheese melt faster, it ensures everything is piping hot and delicious without too much extra time in the air fryer, which could cause the chicken to dry out and become rubbery with a soggy coating.

Since this dish is fairly easy to put together, there's nothing stopping you from making variations of it to suit your mood, tastes, or simply to enjoy more of your favorite flavors. Marinara and mozzarella cheese are, of course, traditional to this dish, but you could swap the mozz for smoked Gouda to give your dinner a nutty, savory goodness reminiscent of smoked bacon. You can also swap out the marinara itself for pesto, as the Parmesan will melt and create a delicious herby crust.

It's also quite delicious to upgrade your chicken Parm with Buffalo sauce and a generous handful of blue cheese. You might need to experiment a bit with timing to get these variations perfect, but the basic method should be the same — bread, fry, flip, fry, sauce, cheese, done. You can also ditch the chicken in chicken Parmesan for a tasty seafood swap by using breaded shrimp instead. Regular, naked shrimp are delicious in this dish, but if you're missing that classic Parm-style crunch, it's also pretty easy to get shrimp crispy in the air fryer.

With this variation, we recommend scooping the shrimp into a pre-warmed, oven-safe dish before topping it with warm marinara and cheese. Since the shrimp are several small pieces instead of one large one, like chicken, the marinara and cheese have a greater chance of making a big mess in your air fryer. Placing them in a shallow ceramic dish pretty easily prevents this.