You Need to Know This Rule Before Putting Parchment Paper in an Air Fryer
An air fryer can be a real godsend. These kitchen appliances can cook your favorite crispy foods super fast—without turning the kitchen into a heat sink or leftover fries into a soggy mess. They can do a lot of other surprising things, too. In fact, we love our air fryers so much here, we made a whole book of recipes for them!
To be honest, when the little countertop cooker first popped onto the scene in the 2010s, I wasn't sure what to make of it. Between my Instant Pot, my toaster oven, my coffee maker, and my blender, I wasn't sure I even had room for another device. But as anyone who's used one more than twice knows, these quick-cooking machines are great for making all kinds of stuff. They're basically microwaves that get food crispy instead of soggy.
But they can also be messy. If you've ever tried cooking something with lots of sauce, or crumbs, or both, you've dealt with the hassle of trying to get burnt-on gook out of all the little corners of the basket.
Now, when you're baking, you've probably used parchment paper to line a sheet tray, keeping those cookies from sticking to the pan and making cleanup a breeze. Which leads to the big question:
Can You Put Parchment Paper in an Air Fryer?
And the answer is yes. Parchment paper is a super-helpful tool to use in baking and air-frying, and it makes cleanup super easy. But there's a very important rule you need to follow: Never ever put parchment paper in an air fryer all by itself.
I learned this in the Country Living Test Kitchen by seeing if I could burn parchment paper in an air fryer. Read on to learn more about the test and what happened.
First: What Is Parchment Paper?
Before we get to my tests, it's important to understand what parchment paper is, and how it's different from its cousin, wax paper.
While wax paper is pretty straightforwardly paper that has been coated in a food-safe wax, parchment paper is a little different. It's also coated, but the coating is made of silicone—the same stuff that silpats and some spatulas are made out of. Silicone is both heat resistant and it's nonstick, which is why you can bake cookies right on it, and those cookies slide right off the pan.
You should never bake or cook with wax paper. The wax, of course, will melt and could even catch fire. Okay, now onto the tests.
Test One: Toasting Almonds
For the first test, I decided to simply toast some almonds in the air fryer with a layer of parchment underneath, to see how the parchment fared.
I cut a layer of parchment paper to fit inside the basket, then I added a cup of unseasoned blanched almonds:
I popped the basket in and cooked it at 350°F for 5 minutes. The almonds were only lightly toasted—and the parchment looked more or less the same. So I put it back for another five minutes.
By this point, the almonds were dark—any longer, and they'd be burnt. But the parchment? It had absorbed some of the oils from the almond but otherwise it looked hardly any different:
Results: A basic cooking experiment showed that parchment has no problem handling 350°F, and while most things don't cook for that long in an air fryer, the paper could clearly have kept going.
I was obviously going to need to up the ante.
Test Two: Parchment Paper Alone
For this test, I cranked the air fryer up as high as it could go. (The model in our test kitchen tops out at 400°F.) I set the timer for 20 minutes, then I put a single sheet of parchment paper into the basket by itself, and turned it on.
Within two minutes I knew that something was wrong. The test kitchen began to smell strongly of something burning. Colleagues from a test kitchen next door came over and asked me if I was trying out a new indoor smoker. And while smoke wasn't billowing out of the air fryer, it clearly was close to doing so.
I pulled the basket out and it was empty! Then I noticed something clinging to the top of the inside of the air fryer. I grabbed a pair of tongs, and dislodged it, then put it on the counter:
Here's what happened: The fan that circulates the air in an air fryer immediately blew the parchment up onto the heating element, where it stuck and began to burn. This is what makes it dangerous to put parchment into an air fryer basket by itself. Air fryers work by circulating hot air quickly—typically with a fan—and parchment paper is too light to stay on the bottom of the tray.
Test Two: Weighted Parchment Paper
So for this final test, I decided to weight the parchment paper down before setting the fryer to as hot as possible for as long as possible. I needed something that could take plenty of high heat—and since we don't lack for great cast-iron here at Country Living, I grabbed one of the tiny little pans featured in our skillet s'mores recipe and used it to keep the parchment in place.
Then I set the air fryer to 20 minutes at 400°F and let it go to town.
The result: When I pulled the tray out at the end, the paper was slightly darker, but not really very much. Here's a side-by-side comparison with a sheet of fresh paper:
Conclusion
While the parchment is slightly darker, it's far from burnt. Because air fryers have such small trays, you'll never need to cook food for very long in them. So you should feel perfectly safe using parchment paper in your air fryer, as long as there's enough food on top to weigh it down.
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