Cooking hard-boiled eggs in an air fryer actually works really well

Don’t trust anything on the internet — until Mashable tries it first. Welcome to the Hype Test, where we review viral trends and tell you what’s really worth millions of likes.

The concept behind this story is simple. I saw a TikTok about air frying an egg and, listen, I wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to air fry an egg.

It’s just such a weird idea. But when I saw the TikTok, I also immediately thought it might work.

TikTok user Jackie Hartlaub posted a video in which she air fried whole eggs — for 15 minutes at 275 degrees — to make hard-boiled eggs. The resulting eggs were not hard-boiled eggs in the literal sense — they were never submerged in water, after all — but they sure looked like hard-boiled eggs. It made sense to me. Hard-boiled eggs are cooked by totally surrounding them with water at a constant temperature. An air fryer, in theory, would circulate air at a constant temp and cook the egg in the same consistent manner.

Lots of people seemed to be interested in the hack, since its racked up 4 million views in a day.

Here’s what the process looked like for Hartlaub, who is also known as @LowCarbStateOfMind on TikTok.

Simple enough.
Credit: screenshot: tiktok / @lowcarbstateofmind

So I decided to test this recipe out. If I could chuck eggs in the air fryer for 15 minutes and they’ll come out perfectly hard boiled, that’d be nice to know. Plus, I weirdly needed hard-boiled eggs — a food I don’t eat a ton of — for this salmorejo recipe, which is a Spanish chilled soup.

I preheated my air fryer to 275 degrees, then popped the eggs in for fifteen minutes, which is the recipe according to Hartlaub. I prepped a bowl of ice to dunk the eggs in for a five minute bath once they were finished cooking, which, again, was part of the recipe.

Here’s what my version of the air fryer egg hack looked like.

That’s a good egg.
Credit: Tim Marcin / mashable

I mean, look at the result. That looks exactly like a hard-boiled egg. There were a few issues, though. I had trouble peeling a few eggs but honestly that’s likely a me problem. I am not great a delicate kitchen tasks. Also, a few of the eggs had a speck or two of egg white that had turned a smidge brown, but that did not alter the flavor of the egg at all.

Otherwise, the TikTok hack was a pretty decent way of “boiling” an egg. It took less time than boiling because pre-heating an air fryer to 275 degrees takes vastly less time than boiling a big pot of water. From there, I had ready-to-go eggs in 20 minutes, accounting for 15 minutes of cook time and five minutes in the ice bath. The recipe also provided consistent results across five eggs, which is about all you can ask for. Also, if you prefer your eggs a little runnier, adjusting the cook time slightly should produce softer eggs.

So there you have it, you can air fry an egg.