Air Fryer Grilled Cheese

What You'll Need

• Bread: I've found that relatively thinly-sliced bread works best for air frying grilled cheese. This way the cheese can melt fully before the outside becomes too toasty. Sliced sourdough, potato bread, or multigrain sandwich bread are great options.
• Sliced Cheese: Choose one or several of your favorites: cheddar, American, provolone, etc. Freshly shredded cheese can work, but makes more of a mess in the air fryer basket when flipping. Keep in mind the anti-caking agents added to store-bought pre-shredded cheese prevent the shreds from clumping together in the bag, but can impede meltiness. You may have mixed results if using them here.
• Flavored Spread (optional): An easy way to zhush up a grilled cheese is to add a flavored spread to the inside of each piece of bread. Chipotle aioli (a cheater's version with no raw egg) or other flavored mayos are great options, as is a Laughing Cow wedge.
• Mayo: Spreading a thin layer of plain mayonnaise on the outside of the bread has been my favorite way to cook a grilled cheese since I heard Martha Stewart talk about it years ago. It spreads so much easier on a grilled cheese for air frying than cold butter.

Easy Steps

Making this recipe is straightforward, but the one potential pitfall would be burning the bread before the cheese melts. I prefer to air fry on a slightly lower temperature and tack a minute or two onto the cook time to prevent this from happening.

1. Assemble - Assemble sandwich(es) as you like and spread mayo thinly on both the top and bottom outer sides of bread. Place in the basket.
2. Cook - Air fry at 350°F for 5 minutes, then flip each sandwich over and air fry for another 2-3 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and the grilled cheese is as golden brown as you like.

Tips and Tricks

• Tweak temperature and time as needed. All air fryers behave a little differently - some seem to cook quicker than stated recipe times, slower, etc. It's not a bad idea the first time you make a grilled cheese in the air fryer to pause and check on them as they cook to see if you need to reduce the temperature, extend the timing, etc.
• The more sandwiches, the merrier. You can cook as many sandwiches as you can fit in a single layer in your air fryer basket - the cook time will be the same. Pictured here is the air fry basket from a Cuisinart toaster oven-style air fryer and it can fit four grilled cheeses made with a loaf of standard sandwich bread.
• Jazz up a grilled cheese. Add cooked bacon, pulled pork, grilled or shredded chicken, etc. to bump up the protein. As it cooks pretty quickly, I recommend heating the meat up separately and adding it hot to your grilled cheese. If cold it can slow down the cheese melting.