Cooking a steak in an air fryer is actually quite daunting the first time because if you have always cooked it in a pan or on a griddle you can see it cooking and naturally learn how “done” it needs to look before it is ready for your own personal taste. When using the air fryer you will have to trust your timing, and this naturally will take a bit of practice, and maybe even a couple of errors in the learning process. Hopefully with this guide you can be brought up to speed quickly and avoid too many “mis-steaks”.
As a personal choice I typically have my steaks medium rare, unless it is a fillet which I have rare. For this example, I will be cooking up a 100% grass fed Rump Steak from South Town Farm, who keep Red Ruby Devon cattle.
How long to cook a steak in an air fryer?
As a general rule I cook at about 200 degrees (after pre-heating at this temperature for 5 minutes), based on this I then cook at:
Rare/ Medium Rare – 7 Minutes (turn steak over after 4 minutes)
Medium – 9 Minutes (turn over 5 minutes)
Medium Well – 11 Minutes (turn over 6.5 minutes)
This has to be taken as a guide rather than a rule, why? Because steaks will be different thicknesses, This guide is based on a steak being 1 inch thick. At Ruxstons our steaks are typically slightly thinner than you may get elsewhere because the farms we source from enable their cows to live to a longer age, which in turn, means they will get wider as they grow bigger, and to keep the steaks to the same weight band they have to be slightly thinner cut. Always factor in thickness when cooking a steak in an air fryer as a minute either way on the cooking time will have a big impact on the end result.
In the image I have simply rubbed a little bit of oil into the steak and seasoned with ground pepper and some Icelandic lava black sea salt, you don’t have to be this extravagant of course but it is very tasty. Once it is placed into the air fryer, I drizzle a little more oil on on before turning it on.
How long should I rest the steak for?
Ensure that the steak is at room temperature for at least 20 minutes before cooking and then rest it, resting it is the time between cooking it and serving it. Ideally a steak wants to be rested for the same time it was cooking, so if it was cooking for 7 minutes ensure it rests for 7 minutes.
I personally found the steak slightly different to one cooked in a frying pan or griddle, the steak was slightly more tender, it actually was more like a sirloin than a normal rump steak in terms of softness, whilst the fat was slightly more shrivelled up and possibly slightly chewier, but not in a negative way, just not quite as melt in the mouth as I normally experience.
Overall cooking a steak in an air fryer is a quicker, and cleaner way of enjoying a beef steak, but if you are having friends around it is possibly not quite the show that cooking them on a griddle or BBQ would give you. So, I would always keep an air fryer handy as they will have a use for cooking steaks on occasion.