Hello and welcome to Mashable's Air Friday. I am culture reporter Tim Marcin.
And on air Friday we air fry anything and everything in the name of deliciousness.
This week we are air frying chicken thighs.
Now, if you want to follow along at home,
you can click the icons throughout the video to shop the products that we use.
Okay, so chicken thighs in the air fryer I'm working with
here. I have skin off bone in chicken thighs.
It's what was at my grocery store, what was both a good price and a good product.
Now you can do skin on that might take a little bit. You might want to tweak a little bit just to render
the fat off of that, but still very easy.
The air fryer, you can do boneless and they will cook extremely
fast.
Again, this is what I had.
Now, what I did with these different sizes yesterday
when I had some time, I put them in a marinade.
You can kind of see from the color on the chicken there.
You can do whatever marinade you like, you can Google one,
you can use whatever. I'll tell you what I did.
It's kind of my usual go to marinade when I don't, you know,
want to get creative with whatever headline around.
So I did soy sauce, I did some balsamic vinegar for acid.
I used some pineapple chunks in a can that I had lying around because that's good.
It'll tenderize the meat and give it a little bit of sweetness that'll carry through.
And then I use like some chili garlic, like paste sort of deal to give it a little bit of
heat.
I let that marinate for about a day or so until I was ready to use it.
And then all we're going to do is we're going to season
our chicken thighs.
What I had here, this is a mix of salt,
pepper, cayenne pepper,
because I like a little bit of heat and some dried herbs.
We're going to season the chicken, We're going to preheat our air fryer to about 400
degrees and we're going to cook them for maybe 20 minutes.
But it depends on, again,
you know,
kind of your air fryer and what product you're using.
These are relatively small bone in chicken thighs.
So they could they should cook like relatively quickly using bonus.
They're going to cook extremely quickly.
If they're larger, they might take a little bit more time.
If your air fryer doesn't get quite as hot, it might take a little bit more time.
So you really want to use a meat thermometer to keep track of these things.
But anyway, here we go.
We're just going to season the chicken, mix it in nice and good so you can see just getting it
everywhere. Let that kind of sit in.
So again, for a minute,
while we preheat the air fryer to 400 degrees, I'm going to kind of take a guesstimate that the
thighs will take about 20 minutes to cook.
But again, the way you want to really cook something like
chicken especially, is to get a meat thermometer and just take an
internal temperature.
That's the best and safest way if you're cooking at home.
Chicken, you want to cook to 165 degrees Fahrenheit
internal.
I usually take it a little bit higher somewhere, at least to like one 7175.
Chicken thighs are super forgiving. They don't dry out.
And I just like to make sure that they're fully cooked through before I eat them.
But anyway, we've got preheated I'm going to do is take the
basket. I've got a little bit of canola oil here.
Just read down some of the steps we're going to take our chicken going to lay it down like so you can
hear that's a nice pre-heated air fryer. You can hear the sizzle.
Just lay it down.
Throw them in there for about 20 minutes or so until 165 degrees and then enjoy it.
Okay, so our chicken thighs are finished cooking.
I mentioned that my thighs were on the smaller side,
so they actually finish in about 15 minutes.
I took internal temperature readings with the meat thermometer.
We ranged from everywhere around like 167 to on the high end,
178 in different parts of the chicken thighs on different thighs.
So that means we're cooked through,
We're good. I'll give you a peek.
This is what they look like, nice and charred on the top and cooked all the way
through.
I'm going to get them on a plate and we'll give them a taste.
Here's how they look on a plate. Nice and played it up.
You you can see we've got some char tender meat inside.
Obviously still hot. That's really good.
I really recommend this recipe.
I think marinating the chicken thighs is really the way to go.
You get an amount of flavor throughout the whole chicken that you're just not going to get
otherwise. I think you need these straight and you just have to
like that.
But what I really appreciate is it's sort of like a staple that you can use elsewhere if you want to
make a salad.
You can air fried chicken thighs and put it over salad,
over rice, whatever.
It's a really great thing to have around. Yeah.
So I say manage your chicken thighs As long as you use them soy sauce and acid,
you'll be good. Maybe a little sugar or something.
Sweet. Yeah.
This is the sort of thing you should do in your air fryer instead of kind of like hacky like hacks.
You'll see on TikTok that really it never ends up being that good cook real food.
It's great.