This Juicy Air-Fryer Salmon Makes Weeknight Dinners a Breeze

Perfect roasted salmon should have crisp skin, and moist and tender flesh. But this can be tricky to achieve. The skin can stick to the cooking surface, the salmon can easily overcook, and the layer of fat underneath the skin can come out greasy. A simple, quick, and less messy way to get perfect roast salmon is to cook it in the air fryer.

While the device is called an air “fryer,” you’re technically still roasting when using one: Air fryers are essentially small, high-powered convection ovens. They take significantly less time to heat up and cook food, and their ability to circulate hot air quickly and evenly makes them especially handy for crisping up and roasting foods efficiently.

The enclosed cooking environment and compact structure of the air fryer also contains the mess more than if using a skillet or full-size oven. There’s no smelly fish fat splatter to clean off your stove’s backsplash or oven walls after cooking. And thanks to the air fryer’s built-in timer and controlled temperature, you don’t have to monitor the fish as closely as you would if cooking on the stovetop or in the oven.

How to Prevent the Salmon from Sticking in an Air Fryer

A major issue when cooking salmon with dry heat—whether it’s seared in a skillet or roasted in the oven or air fryer—is how the fish’s delicate flesh and skin are prone to sticking to the cooking surface. As Kenji points out in his pan-seared salmon recipe, if salmon touches a cooking surface that’s too cold, it can actually form a chemical bond with the metal, making it almost impossible to lift or flip without tearing the fish or skin. Preheating the air fryer ensures the basket is already at the proper cooking temperature, so when the fish hits the basket, the hot surface will rapidly set the proteins in the fish before there is a chance for them to start bonding with the surface.

Patting the salmon fillets dry right before seasoning and oiling them and placing them in the air fryer basket is another way to guarantee the salmon starts cooking on immediate contact with the basket. Moisture left on the surface of the fish can quickly suck away heat, so it’s important to dry your fish carefully.

If you do have a little time to spare, dry-brining the salmon at least 45 minutes in advance and letting it rest in the fridge on a wire rack set in a sheet pan uncovered for several hours can help the fish retain more moisture as it cooks while drying the surface. But if you don’t have at least 45 minutes, it’s best to season right before cooking, to prevent moisture drawn out by the salt from interfering with crisp skin.

And the final way to prevent the salmon from sticking in the air fryer basket is to create a non-stick cooking environment by rubbing the fish all over with oil and spraying the inside of the basket with cooking spray right before cooking. When spraying the basket, just make sure to do so away from direct heat of the air fryer. 

How to Get Tender Flaky Air-Fryer Salmon With Crisp Skin

As mentioned earlier, the constant air flow in the air fryer does a great job at drying the exterior of foods and promoting browning, but with salmon you want to make sure the fish’s skin crisps at the same rate as the inside of the fish is cooking. If the temperature is too high, the salmon skin will start to scorch before the fish is fully cooked inside, and if the temperature is too low, the flesh will overcook before the skin has a chance to crisp. After rounds and rounds of testing, we found three key steps to guarantee salmon that has crisp skin with a perfectly cooked interior.

• Pay attention to fillet thickness: Two pieces of salmon that both weigh the exact same amount can be different thicknesses depending on the specific salmon and where on the fillet they’re cut from. This difference in thickness can directly impact the final cooking result—the thinner the fillet, the less time it will take to cook, which means the skin has less time to turn crispy. The reverse scenario is true with thicker fillets.

  We tested cooking salmon fillets of five different thicknesses, starting at 3/4 inch thick and increasing in quarter inch increments all the way up to two inches thick. We found that the thinner fillets reached the proper internal cooking temperature before the skin had a chance to fully crisp, and the two-inch-thick fillet’s skin verged on burnt by the time the internal temperature reached our desired 120°F medium-rare. The “sweet spot” were fillets that were 1 1/4 to 1 1/2- inch thick. In the time it took the flesh of these fillets to reach 120°F, the skin dried out and had a pleasant crispness to it. Fillets of this thickness will come from the center cut of the salmon; try to avoid the tail end, which yields much thinner slabs of fish.