What’s cooking this AirFryday: Pull-apart bread rolls

We’re making bread rolls this week, nice pull-apart ones that are quick and easy to make. But first, here are my 10 tips for baking bread in your air fryer.

1. Use an old-fashioned baking tin when baking bread in an air fryer, as the metal conducts heat really well and this helps the dough to cook through evenly.


2. Use the rack at the bottom of your air fryer when baking bread or rolls. The underside of the bread needs to cook too, and the element is above so the placing of the rack allows air to blow around underneath the tin in which you’re cooking the bread. Without the rack, the bottom of the bread might be doughy.


3. Do ensure that there is space around the tin for air to circulate as well as underneath. It must not fit so snugly that there is no chance of air circulating around the edges of the pan.


4. Always judge the cooking time according to what you know about your own machine. Just like conventional ovens, air fryer brands are all different, as are sizes and capacity. A recipe may say cook at 180℃ for 15 minutes but you might know, from past experience with your particular machine, that yours tends to take a little longer or cook a tad faster. So make a judgment call based on that knowledge. My conventional gas oven has a personality all of its own, nothing in a recipe ever works exactly the same in it. Then there’s the matter of convection or not. If you’ve ever used a conventional oven, in fact, you’ll be all too familiar with these differences and the effect they have on a given recipe. So the same rule has to apply.


5. Remember to use a glaze, whether a simple egg wash or melted butter brushed on top of what you’re cooking. It’s easy to forget this trick when focusing on your bread recipe for an air fryer.


6. Pull-apart bread rolls are a sensible choice for an air fryer because the baskets tend to be rather small and having them placed so snugly makes full use of the tin. I managed to get seven rolls into a small cake tin; you might manage eight at a push.


7. You can use your air fryer to proof your dough, if it is one which can be set to a temperature as low as around 60℃. You put the dough in, in a bowl which you have sprayed with cooking oil spray, and “cook”, for want of a better word, for 8 to 10 minutes, to allow the dough to rise.


8. But I prefer to heat the machine and turn it off, then proof the dough. Preheat your air fryer to 60℃ for a few minutes, turn it off, and put the dough in, in its bowl to prove, until it rises, just as you would use a warmed oven for rising dough.


9. Turn your baked bread rolls into garlic bread by slicing in half, smearing the insides with garlic butter, sandwiching them back together and baking in the air fryer for 5 minutes at 80℃ or until the butter has melted inside. Do check, as all air fryers behave in their idiosyncratic ways.


10. Day-old bread that’s turned hard can be refreshed quickly in your air fryer. Preheat it to, say, 60℃, and put the hard bread in for 2 or 3 minutes to refresh.