Air fryer food categories
Every food we cover, grouped by how it cooks. Proteins want a flip and a USDA internal-temperature target; vegetables want a light oil-spray and a basket shake; frozen-bag foods want no thaw and a hotter dial; appetisers, breakfasts and desserts each have their own routines. The 6 categories below cover the 310 foods in the catalog — leftovers live separately on /reheat because reheating is a different cook from raw, and the dedicated frozen hub at /frozen covers freezer-to-basket cooking technique in its own per-product pages.
118 foods
Proteins
Chicken, fish, pork, beef and other meats.
62 foods
Vegetables
Fresh vegetables — leafy, cruciferous, root and squash.
4 foods
Frozen Foods
Anything that goes straight from the freezer into the basket.
65 foods
Appetizers
Small bites, fried snacks, party food.
27 foods
Breakfast
Eggs, bacon, sausage and morning starters.
34 foods
Desserts
Cookies, baked apples and sweet baked goods.
Looking for the full list instead? Browse every food in one place →
FAQ about how this catalog is organised
- What's the difference between the category index and the flat food list?
- Same foods, two ways of finding them. The category index groups foods by how they cook — proteins, vegetables, frozen-bag products, appetisers, breakfasts and desserts — which is useful when you have an ingredient in hand and want to land on the right type of cook (proteins want a flip and an internal-temperature target, vegetables want oil-spray and a basket shake, frozen wants no thaw and a higher dial). The flat /food list is the searchable index with category and time-bucket filters — useful when you know the food name and want to jump straight to the cooking page. Same data, different entry points.
- Why is there both a /frozen hub and a /category/frozen page?
- Different scopes. /category/frozen covers the foods in the site catalog that are bought-and-cooked-from-frozen as their default form (frozen tots, frozen mozzarella sticks, frozen chicken nuggets) — same per-food page structure as the rest of the catalog. The /frozen hub is the dedicated SEO surface for frozen-food cooking technique with its own per-product pages at /frozen/[slug] — that's where the air-fryer-specific bag-to-basket times live, separate from the main catalog. Overlap is intentional; both surfaces serve different search patterns.
- Why isn't there a /category/leftover page?
- Leftovers have their own dedicated hub at /reheat with its own per-leftover pages — reheating is a different cook from raw, the target is to warm-and-re-crisp rather than to cook through, and the per-leftover times sit at different temperatures from the raw versions of the same food. The site catalog focuses on cooking from raw or from frozen; the reheat hub focuses on cooking from already-cooked. Two different routines, two different hubs, no duplication.
- I only have 10 minutes — is there a category for that?
- Yes — the /quick hub lists every food on the site that finishes in under 10 minutes (currently around 15 foods spanning thin proteins like salmon and shrimp, pre-cooked items like hot dogs and frozen mozzarella sticks, and small vegetables like asparagus and broccoli florets). It's not technically a category — it cuts across all six — but it serves the same purpose: filtering the catalog by how the food cooks, not by what it is. The /food index also has a cook-time bucket filter for the same job.
- Is there an air-fryer-impossible category — what shouldn't go in at all?
- There's no category for it because it's not a cookable group — it's a safety list. Wet batter (tempura, beer-battered fish, scratch corn-dog batter), loose leafy herbs (basil, parsley, cilantro), bare popcorn kernels and bare shredded cheese all fail in an air fryer for physical reasons — they drip through the basket onto the heating element, get blown into the element by the fan, or melt through the grate. The safety hub covers each failure mode with the working alternative (pre-breaded items instead of wet batter, parchment cradle for loose pieces, etc.).