Blistered Sugar Snap Peas

Doneness

Pods are bright emerald green with charred blistered spots; surface is wrinkled but pods still hold their shape; bite-test reveals snappy-tender flesh and crisp peas inside. Any pod that has gone uniformly dull green or limp is overcooked — sugar snaps are at their best the moment they blister.

Oil & seasoning

Toss in a bowl with 1 tablespoon olive oil and a generous pinch of salt before loading — the oil helps the char build evenly across the curved pod skin and weighs the lightweight pods down so they don't lift in the airstream.

Season with: coarse sea salt, freshly cracked black pepper, minced garlic (added after cooking, not before), lemon zest, toasted sesame seeds, red pepper flakes, drizzle of toasted sesame oil or chili crisp to finish.

Watch out for

• !Strip the strings BEFORE cooking. The long fibrous string runs along the seam from stem to tip — snap the stem end and peel down, the string lifts off in one piece. Strings cooked into the pod are tough to chew and ruin the snap.
• !Add minced garlic AFTER cooking, not before. Raw garlic burns to bitter-black in under 90 seconds at 380 °F — toss the cooked hot pods with the raw garlic in the bowl so the garlic cooks gently in residual heat instead of incinerating in the basket.
• !Don't overshoot 6 minutes. Sugar snap peas peak texture is snappy-tender with char spots — push past 8 minutes and the pods wilt into soft sad green tubes. The whole point of the air fryer for sugar snaps is the short high-heat blister; this is not a long-cook vegetable.
• !Single layer is non-negotiable. Overlapped pods steam each other and the result is uniformly limp instead of charred-and-snappy. Cook in two batches if you have more than 1 lb — the cook is short enough that two batches still beat the time of one stir-fry skillet.