Air Fryer Patatas Bravas (Vegan, Gluten-Free)

Walk into almost any tapas bar in Spain and order without thinking, and you'll likely end up with patatas bravas — "fierce potatoes," named for the sauce, not the spud. It's bar food in the truest sense: fried potato cubes, a smoky-spicy red sauce built on pimentón, a toothpick, a glass of something cold. In Madrid the sauce tends to be pure brava — no tomato-and-mayo blur, just pimentón, a little heat, and acid — and every bar will tell you theirs is the only honest version. Arguing about it is half the fun.

The frying is the part the air fryer changes, and I'll be straight about the tradeoff: deep-frying gives bravas that uniform, craggy, oil-crisped exterior that's genuinely hard to fully reproduce. What you get instead is a very good crisp-edged, creamy-centered potato with a fraction of the oil — and, on the clean-eating side, no nutritional sleight of hand: potatoes, olive oil, tomato, smoked paprika, garlic, vinegar. Food you can pronounce. Two moves matter: soak and dry the cubes hard before they go in, and sauce them at the very last second, because a crisp potato sitting under wet sauce is on a short clock.

Give the cubes space to spread out in the basket; crowded potatoes steam soft instead of crisping.