I'll admit, I was very skeptical to air fry bison. I heard air-frying steak could be delicious or disgusting depending on how someone liked their steaks cooked. Bison should be cooked low and slow because it's grass-fed, lean, red meat. For that same reason, the first thing you think of cooking a bison steak would probably not be an air fryer. At the same time, if it's late at night and you need to make dinner quickly while holding a baby like me, an air fryer and some frozen vegetables may be your best friend.
For this experiment, I used a COSORI air fryer, and, for the most part, followed the instructions in the owner's manual for steaks. I had 2 very freezer-burnt t-bone steaks and decided I would try to use them to avoid ruining a perfectly good steak just in case!
Ingredients:
Salt
Pepper
Olive Oil
T-bone Steak
Instructions:
Remove the thawed steaks from the freezer and sit them on the counter until they hit room temperature.
Pre-heat your air fryer according to the instructions (we used 400F).
Pat your steaks dry and rub them in olive oil, then generously season with salt, and pepper.
Put your steaks in the air fryer according to the instructions (we used 400F for 10 minutes on 1 side and prepared to flip them. Our instructions said 400F, 10 degrees on both sides).
Unfortunately, after 10 minutes it looked like our steaks were already cooked past medium-rare with a very boiled-looking exterior. I didn't finish cooking the steaks to the instructions and removed them at this point. Luckily, the fat looked beautiful!
Technically, from here the steak is finished. I hated how it looked though, so I heated up my cast iron with oil, waited until it smoked from the high heat, and reverse-seared the meat.
My verdict:
I have never made an air-fried steak prior to this post and I was very skeptical about how it would taste. It was definitely easier to multi-task since I didn't have to sear all the sides of the steak to render the fat, but other than that I don't think it necessarily saved me time. If anything, it took longer to preheat (5 minutes), cook (10 minutes), and reverse sear (personal preference, ~2 minutes) for a total of almost 20 minutes. My husband said his fat was rendered perfectly and he liked the cook of the steak, but I personally wouldn't cook bison in an air fryer unless necessary given the quick cook without a crusted sear.
