Air Fryer Spam

How to air fry spam

1. Get the rice on first if you are having it, and the egg after the Spam rather than before - the slices are twelve minutes and both of those are quicker. Run a knife around the inside of the can, turn the block out onto a board and cut it into six even slices. Six is what the can's own label calls six servings, and it is deliberately thicker than the quarter-inch a skillet recipe asks for, for the reason set out below. The block is soft enough to squash under a knife, so use a long thin blade and draw it through in one stroke rather than pressing down, or you get six wedges instead of six slices. Nothing goes on the slices themselves - no oil, no seasoning, and nothing needs to. The spring onion, the sesame, the salt and the pepper all belong to the rice and the egg.
2. Preheat the air fryer to 375°F (190°C).
3. Add the fresh spam to the basket. Lay the slices flat in a single layer with a gap between each one, and do not let two of them overlap. Everything this cook achieves happens on the two flat faces, so a face with another slice sitting on it has been taken out of the recipe. Six go flat in one layer in most 5-6 quart baskets; if yours is smaller, run them in two batches rather than shingling them.
4. Cook for about 12 minutes, turning the slices over at 6 minutes so both faces get their spell against the metal.

How to tell when it's done

You are reading colour and nothing else, because there is no interior to reach. Twelve minutes at 375°F (190°C) with one turn takes the slices to a deep, even gold, the edges a shade darker than the middle of the face, and a surface that has gone matte rather than wet-looking. Lift one on the tongs and it should hold itself flat rather than sagging over them; a slice that still folds has a face that has not set. If the edges are already brown while the middle of the face is still pale, the dial was too high rather than the time too short: an edge has fast air on more sides of it than the middle of a face does, so it always runs ahead, and the lower the temperature the smaller that gap is by the time the face catches up. Spam browns sooner than a plain pork chop would in any case - it is cured, and sugar and modified potato starch are both on the ingredient list. Take them out a shade short of what you want, because a hot slice carries on darkening for a minute on the plate.

Air fryer Spam: the fat it renders is the frying medium, and the basket is where it goes

Basting means putting fat back onto the food, so it is worth following where the fat actually goes. In a pan it has nowhere to be except the pan: it collects, it climbs the sides of the slice, it stays hot, and there is more of it at minute eight than there was at minute three - a slice in a skillet finishes by shallow-frying in a pool it made itself. In a basket the same fat renders at the same rate and falls straight through the perforations into the drawer, and none of it comes back. Our salmon fillet page already says this about a fillet's skin: the rendered fat drops through into the drawer rather than pooling under the fish, where on a solid pan it would go on frying the underside. So from the same starting slice, the amount of fat in contact with the meat rises through a pan cook and falls through a basket one. That is not a difference of degree. It is two processes wearing the same recipe.

Which raises the question of what does brown the underside of a Spam slice, and the answer is the thing it is lying on. This site is consistent about it: our brussels sprouts page has a flat face against the perforated basket browning the way it would in a hot pan, because metal conducts heat far better than air does, and our texas toast page calls the side on the basket the face with the least to worry about. A Spam slice is nothing but two flat faces, so the one that is down has a route for heat that the one pointing up does not have at all. That is what the turn at six minutes is for. It is not there to even out the colour and it is not a tidying-up step - each face gets one spell on the metal and one spell in nothing but moving air, and six minutes is where they swap. Leave a slice unturned and you get one good face and one that has only been dried.

Our beef burgers page watches the same fat leave and reaches the opposite conclusion, which is why the two are worth reading together. A beef patty renders a great deal of fat, in a skillet it sits in the pool and comes out greasy, and losing it through the perforations is called a fair swap there. It is a fair swap there, because a burger's objective is inside it - 160°F right through - and the rendered fat is a by-product on the way to that. Here there is no inside. The objective is entirely the two faces, the fat was the only medium this dish was ever going to be cooked in, and the appliance is built to get rid of it. None of which makes the basket the wrong tool: it works on both faces at once, without a pan of hot oil to turn, without spitting and without standing over it, which is why people use it.

It does mean you are drying the slice at least as much as frying it, and that prices two instructions the recipe pages hand out without a reason. Cut the slices thicker than a skillet recipe asks for, so there is still a soft middle underneath two dried faces - that is the whole content of the warning not to slice them too thin, and it is why this page divides the can six ways rather than twelve. And stop when the colour arrives rather than pushing on for the lacquered, blistered face a pan gives you. That face is built by fat held against meat, and once the fat is through the holes the extra minutes are not building it. They are only taking water out.

Converting from an oven recipe

If your recipe is written for a conventional oven, lower the temperature by about 25°F (15°C) and reduce the time by roughly 20% to land near 375°F for 12 minutes. Need a different starting point? Use the conversion calculator.