Stop Cooking Chicken Parm In The Oven: It's Done So Much Faster This Way

No matter how you make it, chicken parm is the perfect comfort food. It's warm, cheesy, and almost universally loved by kids and adults alike. We like the light twist that Giada De Laurentiis puts on her chicken parm, but, sometimes, a more traditional (read: crispy) take is what we crave. On a weeknight, the concept of heating oil on the stovetop and potentially making a splattered mess while painstakingly frying batches of chicken is less than appealing. Hear us out — this is a moment when your air fryer should come into play.

There can be a tendency to think of this nifty countertop appliance as faddish, in the same way that the George Foreman grill came and went in the collective popular consciousness. When it comes to chicken parm, however, the air fryer method has serious benefits. Not only does the circulating heat get the chicken perfectly crispy (which is the same reason we like to cook hot dogs in the air fryer), but it's done without the mess that normally accompanies the "usual" method of cooking this dish. 

If you care about calories, you will also love the fact that you don't need to use really any cooking oil to crisp up your chicken parm in the air fryer. Perhaps the biggest benefit of using your air fryer for chicken parm, however, is that it's done very quickly. Cooking the chicken, which could take the better part of 45 minutes by the time you heat up the oil and prep the cutlets, can be done lickety-split. Depending on the thickness of your chicken pieces, you might only need as little as 10 minutes in the air fryer!

Cooking chicken parm in the air fryer isn't that complicated or deep, honestly. The biggest prep task is to butterfly or otherwise portion your chicken breasts so that they are thin. This will ensure that your chicken gets very crispy and will cook through quickly. You can bread your chicken as you normally would, using either an egg dip or your alternative preferred method for getting your breading to stick. We like to really jazz up our chicken parm by adding grated parmesan cheese (yes, the stuff in the green shaker bottle!) to our breadcrumbs for extra flavor.

When it comes to your cheese topping, either parmesan or mozzarella are the usual suspects — here's how to store parmesan cheese in the fridge, if you were curious. We're never mad about folks branching out and diversifying their cheese options by mixing something sharper with the melty mozz ... how about asiago or fontina? Note that your cheese should be melted atop the chicken once it's already cooked through, a step that should only take about three extra minutes in the air fryer. Keep an eye on it so the cheese doesn't burn!

Some folks swear by a homemade tomato sauce for their chicken parmesan, and we agree that's something special. We're focused on easy weeknight dinners in this case, however — hence the appreciation of how fast the air fryer works. Buying a jarred marinara is just fine. If you want, feel free to doctor your sauce up with some additional herbs from your spice cabinet.