Air Fryer Hard Boiled Eggs (Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free)

Let's be honest about what this is: a convenience trick, not sorcery. A pot of water hard-boils eggs perfectly well and has since humans owned pots. The air fryer version doesn't taste better, cook faster, or peel itself. What it does is remove the pot, the boil, and — the actual selling point — the watching. No waiting for water to boil, no lid rattling, no wandering back to a kitchen full of steam because you got pulled into an email. Eggs in, timer on, walk away. For meal-prep Sunday, when the machine is going anyway and every burner has a job, that's genuinely worth something.

The science is the same as the pot's: eggs cook by temperature and time, and 270°F of circulating air for 15 minutes lands a large fridge-cold egg at fully set without the green-gray ring that says overcooked. The one variable that matters is your specific machine — air fryers run hot or cool by 10 or 15 degrees, and eggs are unforgiving about it. Sacrifice one egg to your first batch, crack it open, and adjust by a minute in either direction. After that, the timing is yours forever.

Do not skip the ice bath, and don't shortcut it to a rinse under the tap. Five minutes in genuinely icy water does two jobs: it slams the brakes on carryover cooking, and it contracts the egg away from its shell membrane — which is most of the difference between a clean peel and a cratered one. The other half of peeling luck is egg age; eggs a week or two old peel better than farm-fresh ones, which is the single best use for the carton that's been lingering in the back of the fridge.