Can You Make Popcorn In The Air Fryer?

The air fryer is a remarkably handy tool in the kitchen. It's convenient to use when making relatively small batches of food (though many can even accommodate whole chickens). Air fryers cook things efficiently and rapidly, thanks to how it forces heated air around your food. Because of this cooking mechanism, you might wonder if an air fryer would make a decent air popper for your popcorn — air poppers theoretically circulate heated air around corn kernels, after all. Wouldn't air fryers do the same thing for popcorn?

Please don't go putting your unpopped popcorn kernels in your air fryer just yet because there's a key design component that makes most air fryers less than ideal for making popcorn. This could potentially scorch your snack or even light it on fire under the worst possible circumstances. Besides, there are not a ton of smells in the kitchen that are more disappointing than burnt popcorn, except for maybe burnt cookies. Let's avoid that altogether, shall we?

There are a few things at play here. First, it might be a wasted effort because the ideal popping temperature for popcorn is between 400 and 460 degrees Fahrenheit. Some air fryers don't quite reach those temperatures. And second of all, should your air fryer have that kind of power, there's yet another problem. The heating element in a basket-style air fryer is typically located above the basket within the body of the device. It's directly positioned over your food, and if your popcorn starts to pop, there's a good chance that its jumping motion, coupled with the pungent air circulation inside the air fryer basket, could whirl the kernel right into the heating element itself, and that's a recipe for disaster.

At the very least, there's the possibility of gross burnt popcorn (especially with the layer that eventually ends up closest to the heating element), and at worst, if the chamber should overflow with popped kernels, you could get some that directly come in contact with the heating coil. That's just begging for trouble — you'll definitely experience smoke, but what you really want to avoid is flame, obviously. So no, for your sake, you absolutely should not put popcorn in your air fryer, and we have a whole host of other things that you shouldn't put in there, either.