Catfish Out of Water

I'm incredibly fond of cheese curds. They're quintessentially Wisconsin and Costco sells them in multiple pounds around here! But they're not strictly reserved to the Dairy State. For one thing, California has had superior cheese producing numbers for decades. And I grew up in Oregon where the Tillamook cheese brand is based. One of my favorite things about going to the beach as a kid was going to the Tillamook Cheese Factory for the "squeaky cheese." Now, Oregonians don't deep fry them with quite so much gusto! So, in that regard I'm much more likely to grab a raw piece of cheese to snack on. But, there is something very fun about making air fryer cheese curds.

I tend to avoid anything deep fried. A roommates dog once ate an entire pint of deep fryer oil and then proceeded to puke it all up in my bed in the middle of the night! The dog was fine. But the comforter and sheets were absolute toast. So, nutritional value aside? I simply object to having a deep fryer in the house! They're also incredibly bulky, a pain to clean, and you end up with copious amounts of oil that you should never put down the drain.

Oftentimes I'll lightly fry things with a little bit of oil in a skillet and just rotate until fully cooked. But cheese curds are obviously going to melt if you slowly cook them like that! And part of the fun of cheese curds is that they heat enough to ooze, but not enough to ooze out of the batter before you bite into it. And the best way that I've found to do this is in the air fryer.

Freeze the Cheese Curds

My first tip to succeeding at air frying these delectable snacks is to freeze them for 10-15 minutes before you cook the cheese curds. This firms up the cheese enough to help it keep its shape without them actually being frozen. After all, the most difficult thing about baking a cheese is making sure that the cheese doesn't just melt and seep out of the breading! And, as much as I like breading? I would prefer that it not be a hollow shell and actually have cheese inside of it.

Just don't leave the cheese curds in the freezer for hours on end. You do actually want the cheese to soften and ooze when you bite into it! You don't want it to be a solid, frozen block.

Keep the Cheese that are Stuck Together

Unlike pre-packaged shredded cheese, most cheese curds aren't covered in an anti-caking agent to keep them from sticking to one another. Since they're more like self-contained little balls of cheese, they don't stick together with quite the gusto as shredded cheese. But they will still stick together a bit! You generally can easily pull these apart, but I recommend against it.

With the smaller pieces, just go ahead and keep them stuck together! The larger cheese curds cook better. They keep their shape better without melting through the breading and overall are just easier to bread and work with than dealing with the itty bitty pieces of cheese.

That's why some of my cheese curds look massive. It's because they are.

Double Bread the Curds

This is a restaurant secret that most home cooks don't realize. A single breaded piece of cheese is just not going to cut it! The cheese is going to seep out of that breading. It quite simply doesn't coat the cheese enough to keep it contained. So, after you put the cheese through the flour, egg wash, and bread crumbs? Pack the breading onto it closely by holding it in your palm and squeezing gently. Then put it back in the egg wash and roll in the bread crumbs again. It also helps to lightly pack the second series of bread crumbs into it.

You really just want to make sure that every single corner of the cheese is covered. If there are bare spots? The cheese will absolutely seep through it! The breading is really just there to house the cheese curd and make sure that it doesn't melt into the bottom of your air fryer.

It can also help to use just a small amount of bread crumbs and swap them out for fresh ones as they get covered in egg.

Do You Need to Pre-Heat the Air Fryer?

I have never found any discernible difference between pre-heating and not pre-preheating the air fryer. It heats so rapidly by design that this step seems entirely unnecessary.

Some people swear by pre-heating the air fryer. You'll hear food blogger after food blogger tell you to do it. However, I don't believe that there is much, if any, need to head this warning.

I would wager that it just harkens back to the need to pre-heat an oven or a deep fryer. Since an air fryer is pretty much the halfway point between an oven and a deep fryer, this would make sense. Both of those items absolutely need to be pre-heated! They take a relatively slow time to heat and need the extra time to reach the correct temperature. Putting anything in an under-heated oven will require a longer cooking time and potentially dry out the dish. And putting anything in an under-heating deep fryer will likely cause it to absorb far too much oil and potentially burn, or at least vastly over crisp, if it doesn't break apart or disintegrate entirely.

However, air fryers are really more like a microwave in that they're designed to heat incredibly rapidly. Have you ever pre-heated your microwave? Do you know anyone who has ever, even as a joke, preheated their microwave? I'm sure that someone somewhere at some point in time for some indiscernible reason pre-heated their microwave. But it's entirely unnecessary. As is pre-heating your air fryer. It heats in a matter of seconds.

Why Are So Many Air Fryer Cheese Curd Recipes So Bad?

I spent quite a while scouring the web for good air fryer cheese curds. They may not be as common as the French fry, but here in Wisconsin? They actually may surpass fries as the deep fried snack of choice. Despite this also being kind of a regional dish, it's not really that outlandish. Deep fried mozzarella cheese sticks are abundant and the same basic concept applies.

So, why exactly are so many air fryer cheese curd recipes so bad??

I don't necessarily have an explanation for this. I think that most people just have never encountered cheese curds or had to bread them? But even manufacturers of cheese curds have really bad recipes for air fryer cheese curds. So, that logic doesn't necessarily follow. And I have no idea why so many of them are so poorly constructed. You can even see in a lot of photos where people have adjusted the colors to make them look cooked properly or carefully placed curds to try and hide the fact that the cheese has obviously seeped through the breading in unacceptable amounts.

The cheese will almost always start to seep thorough because that's an indicator that they are in fact melted. However, the worst cheese curds are ones where all of the cheese has melted out and you're simply left with a shell of crusty breading sans any actual cheese.

I'm just going to chalk this up to you can literally post whatever you want online and there is absolutely no oversight to recipes. We see this happen all of the time with debunking food "hacks." A lot of them simply don't work and are there for, at best, entertainment value and, at worst, flat out lies for advertising revenue.

I've also never found a good beer battered version. I've tried winging it and have never had it turn out. I suspect that this may be something that you do actually need to have a deep fryer for!

Gallery

Variations of Air Fryer Cheese Curds

There are plenty of other snacks that I like to make in the air fryer. It's hands down my favorite silly kitchen appliance and something that I do rave about whenever anyone asks! And sometimes when they don't. I've worked in the food industry for more than a decade and every time that one of us talks about silly culinary gadgets, we get on a tangent about how great air fryers are. I use them as a fryer, roaster, microwave, toaster oven, and oven all in one.