How to cook homemade roast potatoes in an air fryer

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Christmas is the time of year where you begin to panic about whether or not you’ve got enough oven space to cook everything. Luckily, that plucky little appliance sitting on your worktop can lend a hand; we’ve tested how to cook homemade roast potatoes in an air fryer so you’ll be fully prepared on how to do it yourselves.

Obviously, the size of your air fryer dictates how many roasties you can cook at any one time, so you may need to opt for lower quantity sides if you’re planning on doing spuds for eight in a single-drawer air fryer, for example. Larger capacity air fryers will be better suited to roasting huge numbers of spuds and vice versa. 

The timings and temperature in this article are based on using a Ninja dual drawer air fryer, a model which is now discontinued. Its successor is the Ninja Foodi Max AF400UK. My trusty ol’ air fryer has been tasked with cooking pigs in blankets and stuffing for the past few years now, but this Christmas, I’m going to see if it can cook the vegetarian roasties.

As part of my testing, I decided to see how many roast potatoes I could cook in a dual drawer air fryer, as well as how well it did the job.

~ Our favourite air fryers ~

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Method

1. Peel your potatoes then cut into quarters, maybe smaller if your potatoes are hench, and place into a saucepan half filled with water. When you have the number you need, lightly rinse them under the tap to remove excess starch.

2. Refill the saucepan with water until the potatoes are submerged.

3. Over a medium/high heat, parboil the potatoes for around 10-20 minutes until the edges begin to soften. Don’t overboil or your spuds will fall apart and be more suited to making mash. Remember: the smaller the potato, the less time it’ll take.

4. When ready, drain and leave to cool. In doing so, the edges will dry slightly creating a rough, crunchy exterior. Give the potatoes a good shake to rough them up.

5. (Optional) Lightly brush the exteriors with goose – or any meat – fat or olive oil, this will give them an added bit of crunch and flavour.

6. Place each potato in your air fryer. Try not to stack your potatoes as this will stop the heat reaching each part equally, they are, however, allowed to touch. I managed to fit 12 spuds per basket.

7. Select the ‘Roast’ setting on your air fryer and set the time to 20 minutes.

8. At the 10 minute halfway point, flip each roastie over and place the basket back and continue the cook.

9. At the 20 minute mark, take the basket out. If you prefer your roast potatoes on the crispier side, then you can flip them again and return them to the air fryer for another couple of minutes, or until they achieve the level of roast you’re looking for. I added an extra two minutes as I prefer mine crunchier – use the picture of my test potatoes above as a guide on what 22 minutes roasting will look like.