Air Fryer Buffalo Cauliflower

Buffalo cauliflower gets marketed as a diet apology for wings, which sells it short and insults everyone involved. Judged on its own terms, it's a legitimately great bar snack: craggy batter, a vegetable that goes sweet and nutty under high heat, and that unmistakable buffalo combination — cayenne vinegar heat rounded off with butter — that Teressa Bellissimo stumbled onto in that Buffalo bar in 1964 and the world has been licking off its fingers since.

The air fryer earns its place here twice. Deep-frying battered cauliflower is a genuinely annoying home project — the batter wants to weld itself to the pot, and the florets drink oil. The oven, meanwhile, never quite gets the batter past "baked." The air fryer's dry blast sets a thin rice-flour batter into a dry, blistered shell in fifteen minutes, and the second pass after saucing — back into the heat for five minutes — bakes the buffalo on instead of letting it pool in the bottom of the bowl. That double pass is the whole trick. Skip it and you've made hot-sauce soup with croutons.

Two honest notes on the labels. This recipe is gluten-free by construction — rice flour batter, and Frank's RedHot doesn't contain wheat — but it is not dairy-free and we won't pretend otherwise: real buffalo sauce is butter, full stop. The vegan margarine version exists and tastes like the compromise it is. And while cauliflower is absolutely the cleaner plate, a half cup of buffalo sauce is nobody's health food. It's a vegetable having fun. Let it.

One equipment note: the batter will find every hole in your basket, so a perforated liner saves you ten minutes of scrubbing per batch and costs almost nothing.