Air Fryer Doughnuts: The Kitchen Gadget's Greatest Betrayal

The Hype Machine Turns to Dough

Every few months, the internet decides its air fryer can do something it absolutely cannot. First it was roast chicken. Then it was hard-boiled eggs (fine, whatever). Now, according to a tidal wave of TikTok and Instagram reels, your air fryer can produce perfect doughnuts. Fuss-free. Oil-free. Guilt-free, presumably, though the guilt arrives later in a different form.

As a website devoted to doughnuts, we felt duty-bound to investigate. Not because we wanted to believe the hype, but because we suspected a swindle. Spoiler alert: we were right.

The Recipes Under Review

We selected three of the most-shared air fryer doughnut recipes from the past year. All promised golden, pillowy rings with minimal effort. All delivered something else entirely.

Recipe one: the Greek yoghurt dough. Equal parts self-raising flour and thick yoghurt, kneaded into a sticky ball, shaped into rings, and air-fried at 180°C. The video showed a glossy, bronzed doughnut being dipped in melted chocolate. The reality looked more like a sad bagel that had given up on life.

Recipe two: the puff pastry shortcut. Shop-bought puff pastry cut into rings, brushed with butter, air-fried for eight minutes. The promise: flaky, layered doughnuts. The result: greasy, flat discs with the texture of a cheap croissant that had been sat on.

Recipe three: the two-ingredient miracle. Just flour and yoghurt, again, but this time with a glaze made from icing sugar and milk. The TikTok creator called them “insanely good”. We call them “insanely misleading”.

The Experiment: A Kitchen Crime Scene

We followed the instructions to the letter. We weighed, we kneaded, we shaped. We preheated the air fryer like obedient little home cooks. And then we watched through the little window as our dough rings turned a pale, anaemic beige.

No golden crust. No puffed-up swagger. Just a tight, rubbery surface that refused to brown no matter how many extra minutes we added. The glaze slid off like it had been told the party was cancelled. The sugar dusting dissolved into a sad, damp paste.

The kitchen smelled of warm flour and regret. Our smoke alarm remained silent, which was somehow the most insulting part.

The Side-by-Side Taste Test

We placed our air fryer creations next to a fresh jam doughnut from a proper bakery – the kind with a sugar crust that crackles when you bite it and a filling that threatens to escape down your chin. The contrast was brutal.

The air fryer doughnuts were chewy. Not in a pleasant, sourdough way. In a “did I accidentally cook a flip-flop?” way. The interiors were dense and claggy, like undercooked scones. The exteriors had none of the crisp, fried shell that gives a doughnut its structural integrity. They tasted of flour, yoghurt and disappointment.

The shop-bought doughnut, by contrast, was light, airy and unapologetically sugary. It had a crust. It had a soul. It had been made by someone who understood that doughnuts are not a health food and should not be treated as such.

Why It Doesn't Work (A Brief Physics Rant)

Deep frying works because hot oil transfers heat at a ferocious rate. The dough hits the oil, the surface dehydrates almost instantly, and a golden crust forms while steam puffs the interior into pillowy submission. That crust is essential – it's what glaze clings to, what sugar dusts sit on, what gives a doughnut its structural integrity.

An air fryer is a small convection oven. It circulates hot air. That's brilliant for chips, decent for chicken wings, and utterly useless for doughnuts. Without a liquid oil medium, the dough just dries out. It doesn't fry. It bakes, badly, into a tight, chewy ring that tastes like a bagel's disappointing cousin.

The glaze problem is even more fundamental. Icing sugar and water need a fried surface to grip. On a pale, baked dough ring, glaze just pools and slides. It's like trying to ice a wet pebble. You end up with a sticky puddle and a profound sense of shame.

The Convenience Paradox

Here's the thing that really grates. We spent forty minutes making these doughnuts. Forty minutes of measuring, kneading, shaping, preheating, air-frying, glazing and then staring at the results in disbelief.

A proper doughnut from a bakery or even a supermarket costs about a pound. It takes thirty seconds to buy. It tastes infinitely better. The air fryer recipe didn't save us time, money or effort. It just added a layer of performative domesticity to a process that was already solved.

This is convenience culture in a nutshell: convincing yourself that doing something badly at home is better than buying something excellent from a shop. It's the same energy as making your own oat milk and pretending it doesn't taste like watery porridge.

The Verdict: Put Down the Air Fryer

We wanted to be wrong. We wanted the air fryer to deliver on its promise of fuss-free doughnuts. But some things are best left to the deep fryer, and some things are best left to the professionals. Doughnuts are both.

If you want a doughnut, go and buy one. Support a bakery. Buy a bag of sugar-coated rings from the supermarket and eat them in the car like a normal person. But please, for the love of all that is glazed, stop trying to air-fry them.

Your air fryer is brilliant at many things. Doughnuts are not one of them. Some kitchen gadgets need to know their limits. So do some TikTok recipes.

Glazed & Confused verdict: Two out of ten. Would not recommend. Would not repeat. Would like our forty minutes back.