For the Juiciest Pork Chops, Reverse Sear Them...in Your Air Fryer

Made well, pork chops are a juicy, tender cut of meat—but they can just as easily be disappointingly tough and chewy. Because chops come from the loin, a lean cut prone to drying out, it can be difficult to get a good sear without turning the insides into a pile of sawdust. This is even harder to do when you aren’t searing the pork chops on a grill or in a hot pan, and are instead relying on the heat of an oven or air fryer to cook them.

The key to making succulent, flavorful pork chops in an air fryer is to apply a few specific techniques to maximize browning and avoid overcooking. Thanks to its small size and ability to circulate air efficiently, the appliance is a powerhouse that we and many others have come to rely on. To figure out the best way to cook pork chops in the air fryer, we worked with our test kitchen colleague Marianne Williams to methodically test multiple variables until we'd landed on a foolproof method that delivers chops that are juicy and deeply browned. Here are the results.

Tips for Preparing Pork Chops in the Air Fryer

Dry-brining simply refers to salting and resting your meat before cooking it. As former Serious Eats editor Sasha Marx wrote in his guide to the technique, it is our preferred method for seasoning proteins. Unlike a traditional wet brine—which plumps up the meat with excess water and gets in the way of a good sear—dry-brining results in pork that retains more of its natural juices while browning more quickly and deeply.

Here, we recommend dry-brining your pork chops in a mixture of salt, pepper, dark brown sugar, ground mustard, and smoked paprika for at least an hour, but you can salt them up to 24 hours in advance if you have time to spare. Extra time with the brine won't lead to deeper flavor penetration of most of those spices (you can read more about the science of marination to learn why most flavors don't work their way into the meat), but extra time will allow the salt to penetrate more deeply and will give more time for the surface to dry out, aiding browning in the air fryer. 

There’s a time and place for thin-cut pork chops, and this is not it. Thin chops can work great with extremely high-heat applications like deep frying and grilling, but an air fryer needs more time to develop that sear and a thin chop will be cardboard by the time that happens.

We want thick, bone-in pork chops instead—look for chops that are at least 1 1/2 inches thick—as they’ll retain their moisture and flavor as they cook. While a boneless cut makes for convenient eating, bone-in pork chops have more fat and connective tissue near the bone, and that fat and connective tissue delivers more juiciness and flavor in the finished chop while insulating the lean loin from being hit with excess heat on all sides. Plus, you wouldn’t want to miss out on gnawing the bone, which is one of the most satisfying parts of eating a pork chop.

Here, we take a page out of Kenji’s reverse-seared technique by starting the pork chops low and slow at 230ºF (110ºC), then finishing them at 400ºF (205ºC) to trigger the Maillard reaction—the chemical reactions that lead to a deeply browned and flavorful exterior. This two-stage cooking process helps first cook the pork chops gently and evenly on the inside while further drying off any surface moisture, setting the stage for a rapid high-heat step that delivers a crisp, brown crust. 

This is a clever trick Marianne came up with while developing this recipe. She cooks the chops during the initial low-temperature stage without a trivet, giving them more distance from the high heat of the heating element, allowing them to cook more gently. Then, she removes the chops from the air fryer, puts a trivet in the basket, and increases the heat to 400ºF, and adds the pork chops back into the basket. Now elevated, the chops brown more rapidly and evenly due to their proximity to the heating element, as if they were sitting under a broiler.

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