The BEST Air Fryer Onion Rings

making homemade onion rings in your air fryer is super easy to do but there are a few things that you need to know if you want to make the best onion rings and i'm going to share with you all of my tips tricks and secrets so that you can make these at home welcome to the salted pepper where we cook for real life using real food and we keep it real simple today we're going to make a super easy recipe for homemade onion rings this has been asked and asked and asked of me i don't even know how many times probably uh a thousand times over the past two years but guess what it was hard for me to perfect at least to get exactly the texture the flavor profile and the onions cooked perfectly so this was definitely something that took me two years to really get to a point where i can say these are the best airfryer onion rings ever so first thing we're going to do is start to cut our onion up because the prep of the onion is important first of all you want to start off with an onion that's been refrigerated and that's going to help in the next step that i'm going to get to because there's another tip of prepping the onion that's going to make a world of difference in your homemade onion rings so refrigerate it overnight if you usually keep them on the counter or if you've just purchased it from the store now if you don't refrigerate it it's not a deal breaker it'll still work but you can have a little bit of trouble in the next step then we want to cut it so now we need to cut it right and to cut a round vegetable can be kind of challenging so what i found is if i leave the paper on and i just slice a tiny tiny bit not enough to affect the actual onion rings as we separate them but just make a little bit of a flat surface it's a whole lot safer to do so with the peel on i just take a sharp knife and make a tiny i mean tiny little flat spot okay then your onion is not gonna roll away from you so that's number one i leave the peel on for the cutting as well now you could take it off that's no problem but i just leave it on i think it's just as easy so holding your fingers back you want to take a sharp knife and we're going to cut this the stem part off first so i just take one little cut here because those aren't going to be useful for much as far as onion rings go but they are great to freeze and use for bone broth or different stocks that you make so you don't need to throw those out you can freeze them right with the paper on just put them in a freezer bag now we've got our onion and we want to cut it into about half inch rings make sure you keep your fingers back and you have a good hold on the onion but trust me this is a lot easier when you have that little flat spot so i'm just guesstimating here not exact and if you cut some that aren't you know exactly a half of an inch it's fine and then where we cut that little area you're gonna see the skin just peels right off very easily so there's our first set of onion rings now this layer see how that's like papery i also put that into the scrap pile so there's our first set of onion rings that will separate in just a minute i'm going to repeat this process for the entire onion and you want to go down and try to be as even as you can when you're cutting your slices and if they're a little off it's okay but if you get a really thin area on one side and a thicker area on the other they can fall apart when you go to the breading process another thing you can do when you get down to like this part where it's a little wobbly if you are not comfortable holding it stick a fork right there and really hold it down kind of like we're carving right and then go down and i think i'll get two more good slices one more after that one more good slice so i'm gonna go down into the root end here with my fork and cut one more oop well that one didn't work out sorry happens it happens to all of us i think what happened when i put the fork in as i crush this now you can still use these they're just not going to be rings but they'd still be delicious and you know what i'm going to fry them up just to show you okay now this is the fun part or maybe not so fun but it's necessary so i said the second tip of preparing the onions is going to be the best thing that you do and that is to remove the membrane from every single layer so have you ever gotten an onion ring and you go to bite into it it's super crunchy and it's delicious and you're you bite it and then all of a sudden the entire onion falls out hits you on the chin starts to burn because they're hot as can be and then you're left with a stringy onion and breading that has no onion in it that is because the membrane was not removed so as we separate these out into rings just by pushing them gently out i'll do a few here inside here there's a membrane and when the onion is cold this is much easier to do in fact i can see it peeling up right here so hopefully you can see that so i take it i get grasp it between my first finger and my thumb and i pull it and i try to do it gently so it comes out in one piece like that and that's the membrane so i'm going to repeat that again because this is super important it will change the way you feel about onion rings when you do this i'm telling ya so let me get the outer layer off here and when the onions are warmer they don't tend to come off as much or as easy i'm sorry they come off in pieces it's a little bit more challenging now some onions will separate easier than others too just be patient because you really want to get them to wear their nice onion rings okay so if i can't see it i'll take my fingernail and just sort of i'll find it and then i'll pull it and i just pull it right off go around and pull it right off all right go over here and put that in our bowl we're going to repeat that for all of the rings [Music] do all right so i have these here because i wanted to show you so where we made the little the little cut that made it a lot safer for us to make the onion rings themselves we didn't waste the onion because we wouldn't have used this anyway it's really close to the peel and so it's papery and it just would not be a good onion ring but like i said before don't throw away the scraps you can put them in your stock so you can freeze them until you want to use them so i'm gonna clean up here and then we're gonna get to mixing up the batter for our onion rings and we'll start to air fry them all right so i've finished prepping the vidalia onion which is the type of onion that i prefer to use for onion rings but you can use any type of large onion that you want so you can use a yellow onion a white onion even a red onion so if you have an onion that's extremely strong and you want to make the flavor a little more mild or mellower you can go to this step and then fill this a bowl up with water cold tap water and let it sit for about 30 minutes the only thing is if you do that you definitely need the onion rings to be dry before you go to batter them so just keep that in mind you're going to let them dry completely so i would put them out on some paper towels until they're dry then you can proceed with the recipe but usually i don't worry about that's why i get the vidalia because they are sweet and they are mild and they are absolutely perfect in onion rings i love them all right so now we're going to do a combination of a wet batter and a dry batter for this recipe that is common for me that's what i like to do i think it gives the best results on numerous vegetables i have several recipes for airfryer fried mushrooms and i have a fried cauliflower recipe and then i have a delicious chicken nugget recipe and we use the same sort of technique but it varies by each different vegetable because like for example with the mushrooms i coat them in a little flour because they tend to give off liquid the onion rings don't do that so we don't need to coat them with flour but i noticed the onion rings needed more seasoning so that's what we're gonna do today is get them seasoned up in this wet batter i'm starting off with a half of a cup of beer this is cold beer you can use water you don't have to use beer that's perfectly fine just make sure it's cold water you don't want any warm ingredients any warm liquid ingredients going into this or you're not going to have it stick to your onion rings as well then i'm using one tablespoon of cholula and this is room temperature because i didn't put it in the refrigerator but usually i do one tablespoon of cholula that's the hot sauce that i prefer but you could use any hot sauce that you want just keep in mind the level of heat i think cholula is a fairly mild hot sauce kind of maybe like tabasco so i use one tablespoon i've tried it with two tablespoons it was delicious but it was just a little too much for me this will not give you a spicy onion ring so if you want a spicy onion ring you're going to want to add some cayenne or chipotle to the breading the dry breading this just kind of gives a little bit of flavor and it's really delicious then we're going to add in one large egg and i've used a large egg and i've used an extra large egg and it works fine then we're just going to whisk these up a little bit with a fork just so that the egg is kind of dispersed throughout the beer and the cholula gets mixed in doesn't have to be perfect you could do this in a deeper bowl if you don't want to make a mess like i'm doing i think it's the beer that's making it splash out because it's a little fizzier all right that looks good so really just mildly mixed up is perfectly fine now we're going to add in some flour and i have three quarters cup of flour but i don't want you to go just by the measurement i want you to go by the look of this wet batter i also heard from somebody who was in i think it was the uk or it might have been canada no it was canada and they she used her flower and it was really gummy in another recipe similar to this because there are different flowers in different countries so try to find one that is sort of like an american all-purpose flour if you need help with that you can always email me at louise at the saltedpepper.com and i'll try to help in any way i can all right so now we're going to get this sifted in this is the part nobody wants to hear that you have to sift it in but if you just dump it in you're going to get all kinds of lumps and then if you overwork this you're going to develop the gluten and then you develop the gluten and it becomes a globby mess on the onion rings and you don't get that nice crispness when you air fry them so take the time and do it this way okay all right so i do about a quarter cup at a time or whatever fits in my little sifter here there's tons of different sifters you can use a bigger one if you want and i just go over the surface until all of the flour is on top and then i'll fold it in with a fork or chopsticks either way it's fine all right so once that's in i just take my fork and i just fold it you're gonna see it get kind of clumpy don't worry it works its way out i promise okay even though i can see a bunch of lumps i don't worry about that i i have a clean surface here well clean you know what i mean not full of flour so i can move on to the next the next sifting and of course some of the flour fell in over the size of this that's not going to make that big of a difference you just don't want to dump the whole thing in or you'll be sitting here forever this is actually a lot quicker all right so i didn't even finish putting in the three quarters of a cup there's probably about i don't know maybe a tablespoon left because i noticed it was getting a little bit thick so see how thick that is that's just a little too thick for what we want so if that happens to you do not worry about it it is no big deal add in a teaspoon and i mean a teaspoon of water at a time so i'm just gonna put just a tiny bit in there because you don't want to keep chasing this so you want to put just the amount of water to thin it out so it's perfect and it doesn't take much and you see we have a pretty smooth batter here so i'm pretty pleased with that and all those lumps are gone i did not whisk i just constantly kind of folded it and did this sort of emotion okay that's better so it's dripping off this is like a thick thicker pancake batter but i want it to be just a tad bit thinner so i'm gonna go with another teaspoon so this is what i mean when i say don't necessarily go by measurements when you're doing something like this go by how the batter looks that's going to give you the best results because humidity will play a role in flour too so one day you might make this recipe and need three quarters of a cup and the next day you might only need you know a half of a cup so just just go based on how it looks and that's looking a little bit better so it's a little bit thinner it's not as thin as some of the batters that i make even though it's the same ratio of ingredients this one's just a little bit thicker but it's going to work really well for our onions so before we move on to breading our onion rings and getting the ninja foodie preheated i add a little bit of salt to my batter i didn't put this into the flour because this is sea salt the granules are a little bit bigger they wouldn't go through my sifter so what i do is just sprinkle between a quarter and a half of a teaspoon of salt in to this wet batter i found that the onion rings really needed that extra little bit of salt to bring all the other flavors out and it worked perfectly so just sort of fold that in mix that up a little bit and now we are ready to bread our onion rings all right so now we need to mix in some spices to our dry breading mixture what i'm using is one cup of unseasoned bread crumbs this is what i found worked the best and got the texture the closest to what you would get in a deep fried onion ring so that's what i'm going with yes you can add panko you could do a combination of panko and the bread crumbs you could probably even do some crushed pork rinds although there's nothing really a keto about this so i'm not sure why you would do that but you could if you wanted to if you want to cut some of these carbs but i found straight breadcrumbs with some seasoning works the best so i'm gonna add a half of a teaspoon of the fine grind sea salt a half of a teaspoon of onion powder a half of a teaspoon of garlic powder and in some of my test batches because i have tested this so many times i added a little bit of cayenne like maybe an eighth to a quarter a teaspoon of cayenne and i like the flavor but you know for this recipe i thought i would just kind of keep it a little bit simpler so if you don't like spice you won't be disappointed in the breading so this is very basic you can get as creative as you want you could add in some old bay if you wanted to do like some crab flavored onion rings that would be delicious just omit the salt definitely because old bay is pretty salty all right now to breads the onion rings we're gonna take an onion ring and i use two forks to do this i find it to be uh the cleanest way for me because i hate to get my hands dirty believe it or not even though i love to cook so i take the onion ring and i twirl it around and i flip it over and i twirl it around again and i try to get all of the onion ring covered with this batter and then i lift it up with the fork and i let the excess drip off which just takes you know 30 seconds if that all right that looks good then i dump it into the breading i take a different fork and i move the breading over top to cover it completely now you could start off with more breading if you wanted so if you wanted more bread crumbs in here just to make it a little bit easier or you're going to make a lot more onion rings you can certainly do that but what i find if i'm making a double batch is i like to start off with the one cup and then add more to it because as we dip the onion rings in the batter and then into the bread crumbs they do release these little pieces that are kind of a little bit larger which in moderation actually make for a really nice crunchy onion ring but if you get too much it just gets hard to coat them so i recommend starting off with this amount and then adding to it as you go but you can do it the other way to add more it's fine all right so once they are covered then we just lift them out and put them onto a cooling rack or you can put them onto a parchment line plate at this point and i'm seeing all my bread crumbs fall down i told jeff i said jeff remind me tomorrow before i do this video i need to put a tray underneath there because my counter got really messy when i was doing the final test recipe yesterday so let me grab a tray i'm gonna finish up battering all of these up we're gonna get the airfryer preheated on broil for a full 10 minutes and i recommend no matter what airfryer you're using because you don't have to use the ninja foodie it's fine this works in the grill works in an airfry oven although there are some modifications and i will go over those a little bit later um in the video and definitely in the written uh post but in the grill a basket air fryer any kind of airfryer that you have you do want to preheat on the hottest setting [Music] all right so we're all preheated and now we're gonna get to air crisping our first batch of these the amount that you can do at once will totally depend on your air fryer so that will vary but one thing to keep in mind when you're breading your first batch up because i usually bread some air crisps some keep breading while they're air crisping so that we get done you know in a reasonable amount of time so one thing to do is to make sure that you do big ones and the little ones because the little ones can fit inside of the big ones and then you can get more into your air fryer so let me go ahead and do that i've got a couple little babies in here all right i'm gonna use um some oil you can use any type of oil you want but recommend it being a neutral oil so maybe an avocado oil would work um you don't really want to use um any kind of like olive oil or anything like that and i'm gonna spritz the basket because that is extremely important to get the best crispiness actually i'm just going to use my fingers here and we're going to put this down right like that you don't want to use your fingers you could use a a tool or something like that i can use these i guess probably a little bit easier and so i can only get about three or four big ones in this air fryer but like i said i can grab these and put them right in there and grab this one and put it right in there and grab some of these little babies and put them right in there well that one's not going to work too well because you don't want it to touch you definitely want room for the air to circulate around put that one in there so usually i do between two and three batches depending on depending on how big the onion is probably could have gotten a few more babies but anyway i'm done i can't get any of those in there right now so i'm well you know what i probably can so i can probably put this one over there and i could probably get this guy in there we go that looks good all right now give a nice spritz on the top with your oil of choice trying to make sure that all of the breading is coated with the oil that's what's going to give the crunch if you don't do this you're not going to get a really good crunch now we're going to air crisp we're going to air crisp on 360 for seven minutes you do not have to flip these and it's probably one of the very few recipes where i actually don't flip and that's because the bottom gets really nice and brown which is wonderful for the crunch but i found if i flipped then the top got a little more brown and didn't look as nice on a platter so i don't flip these and that is unusual for me all right i'm going to finish the rest of them i'm also going to get some in the oven back there and in the grill just so i can show you the differences and to tell you what you can do if you have the oven or an oven style air fryer because you do want to make some changes all right oh my gosh they're beautiful look oops i gotta grab a hold of it look oh oh my gosh and you definitely want to put them onto a cooling rack to cool not a plate or you will steam and you will undo all your crunchiness for your onion rings oh my gosh these are so perfect like i just can't get over it i think of all the times i just wanted to give up and say i cannot get the perfect onion ring but i didn't thankfully i'm so happy because i'll make these i'll make these all the time and you can freeze them so you could make up a whole bunch you know two three onions worth if you wanted to and you can freeze them cook them and freeze them on parchment line trays once they're fully frozen so just leave them in overnight or something you can put them in a bag and then you can put them right back in the air fryer no extra oil nothing needed put them in a preheated air fryer at about 360 to 375 degrees for about four minutes and they are perfect we just heated some up this morning from frozen they're absolutely perfect all right so i'm going to go ahead and set this back to 360. hit start i only have two done because i was kind of busy doing some other things so i only have two done but i'm going to go ahead and throw them in might as well and then spritz and keep in mind because it looks like i'm putting on a ton of oil the oil goes down to the bottom a lot of it so only what will adhere to the outside of the breading stays stays in in the actual recipe the rest goes down below all right take it down to seven minutes now i'm going to get some thrown into the air fryer the airfry oven behind me at me all right so one of the things one of the differences that you can do if you're going to use an oven air fryer like the one i have back there which is the xl ninja foodie oven is you probably don't want to go right in with your spray bottle and spray all the sides of the oven and everything because it's pretty hard to clean so you want to put it in put these onion rings into a little tray and then spritz them an oil in the tray or a plate or whatever and then spritz them on the top flip them over and spritz them again on the bottom the other thing you want to do with an airfryer oven style is you want to preheat for a full 10 minutes even if your oven like my oven says it's preheated in 30 well one of them 30 seconds one of them is 90 seconds but that is not really the case so they don't really get up to temperature that quickly so you definitely want to leave the preheat on for a full 10 minutes and i preheat again on the hottest setting which is 450 degrees but i'm not going to decrease all the way down to 360 like i did in the ninja foodie and the grill because the air frying functions in an oven aren't quite as powerful in my experience so i'm going to take this up to 400 degrees and we're still gonna go the seven minutes and see how they turn out again i'm so happy with the way these look some of them are getting a little browner than others but they are well definitely put two in that's right all right so let's go ahead and close this up and i'm going to set this for 360. and i'm just going to leave it on the 20 minutes and finish the rest to get them in the ninja foodie and finish up our onion rings by that time hopefully those will be done in the oven and we can give them all a little taste all right so we've got ninja foodie right here we've got oven right here and we've got grill right here they've all had a chance to cool down um the same amount so there's you know not gonna be one's not gonna be hot and the other one's gonna be cold we're fine so let's see now this one has some browning and has some marks on the bottom uh you can avoid that if you flip them but i like the way the top looks when i don't flip so that's what i do all these little crunchies oh i can't wait unreal see how that onion stays right where it's supposed to perfect all right now historically speaking i've never been really too happy with the air crisping ability of any airfryer oven or especially the ones that i've had but these look pretty good so let's give it a try taste a little crunchy part here well okay they're okay they're good don't get me wrong they're good but they're just not as good and i say that every single time but i keep trying but they are better than what i used to get result wise when i would try to air fry in the oven and that's because i preheat longer and i go at a higher temperature so if you have an air fryer oven increase the temperature of a regular airfryer recipe by about you know 25 to 50 degrees and i think you'll have better results all right here we go grill perfect very comparable so good so you can get super creative with this add any kind of spices or seasonings that you like to your dry mixture or your wet mixture for that matter whip up a batch freeze them and then pull some out every time you want an onion ring [Music] as always make it yours make it delicious and keep it real

Channel: The Salted Pepper

Views: 546,210

Rating: 4.8402514 out of 5

Keywords: Ninja Foodi, Ninja Foodi Recipes, The Salted Pepper, Air fryer onion rings, Ninja Foodi onion rings, How to make onion rings in an air fryer, Homemade onion rings, Homemade air fryer onion rings, onion rings in an air fryer

Id: 8uXvEkuKcnM

Length: 29min 13sec (1753 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 28 2021