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Air Fryer Buffalo Chicken Wings

Name: Air Fryer Buffalo Chicken Wings
Prep time: 5 min
Cook time: 16 min
Total time: 21 min
Ingredients: 12 chicken wings (uncooked); ¾ cup flour; 1½ tablespoons ground red cayenne pepper; ¾ tablespoon garlic powder; ¾ tablespoon onion powder; ¾ teaspoon paprika; ¼ teaspoon salt; ¼ teaspoon black pepper; ¾ cup Frank's Red Hot; 4½ tablespoons butter (melted); 1½ tablespoons ranch dressing

ByAlex Langdon Updated onJanuary 17, 2025

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This recipe for crispy air fryer buffalo chicken wings packs the perfect amount of heat, flavor, and mess into a classic game day appetizer.

Buffalo wings are a classic party appetizer – often one people can’t get enough of. And anyone looking to throw a good football party absolutely must know how to make a good batch of buffalo wings.

Lucky for you, we have a super easy recipe that meets the three major requirements of a good buffalo wing:

Crispy skin on the outside, tender meat on the inside.
Just the right amount of heat – spicy, but not too spicy.
The messiest buffalo sauce ever.

What This Recipe Entails

You can’t host a game day party without making buffalo chicken wings. Thankfully that doesn’t have to be hard.

Prep time: 5 minutes
Cook time: 16 minutes per batch

It takes 16 minutes to cook the chicken wings (8 minutes per side). So if you have a small air fryer, or are making a lot of wings, you’ll want to allow more time for multiple batches.

Ingredients

There are three main components needed for making crispy chicken wings: the wings, the flour, and the sauce. Here’s how we make ours:

Chicken wings – raw and thawed.
Seasoning – flour, garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne pepper, paprika, salt, black pepper.
Buffalo sauce – butter, Frank’s Red Hot, ranch dressing.

How To Make Air Fryer Buffalo Wings

Thanks to our handy-dandy air fryer, making crispy buffalo chicken wings is surprisingly easy. Here’s what you need to know:

Toss the chicken wings in seasoned flour.
Cook the wings in the air fryer.
Make our simple 3-ingredient buffalo sauce.
Toss the wings in buffalo sauce and serve!

We tested out a few methods when developing this recipe and learned that air frying produced the best results, versus baking or frying in oil. Here are a few key takeaways from our experiment:

The air fryer creates a perfectly even crisp on the wings, but doesn’t dry out the meat.
The wings were less greasy than when we fried them (plus, they’re healthier without all the oil!)
Baking wings just doesn’t give you that same fried-bar-food texture and flavor.
Air frying creates less mess than frying, which means less to clean up later.

Serving Suggestions

Buffalo wings are a classic game day snack for a reason. You just have to have them. Here are some of our other must-have game day recipes:

BBQ pulled pork nachos – Other than buffalo chicken, BBQ is our favorite game day flavor and these nachos do not disappoint.
4 layer Mexican dip – You’ve gotta have a dip on game day. Especially one made with cream cheese, no-bean chili, and piled high with cheese.
Air fryer buffalo cauliflower bites – For our vegetarian friends who don’t wanna miss out on that delicious buffalo hot sauce.
Soft pretzel bites and beer cheese dip – A snack you just can’t resist no matter how full you might be.

Be sure to rate and comment below if you enjoyed this recipe!

FAQs

For an air fryer at 400 degrees, you’ll want to cook chicken wings for 16 minutes flipping halfway through.

The buffalo sauce goes on the wings after air frying. This allows for the wings to get crispy while cooking and then get tossed in sauce.

Yes, the flour helps the wings to crisp while cooking.

If your wings aren’t crispy you may have overfilled your air fryer. For crispy wings, they need to be cooked in a single layer while not touching one another. Another reason for not crispy wings is letting them sit too long in the sauce. As soon as the wings are sauced, they will slowly start losing their crispiness as the sauce soaks in.

Expert Tips

If you are making a lot of wings and need to do multiple batches in your air fryer, keep the cooked wings warm by placing them on a greased sheet pan in the oven at its lowest temp.
Be sure to spray the bottom of the air fryer basket before every batch so the wings don’t stick. You don’t want to lose any of that crispy outer layer!
Don’t sauce the wings until you’re ready to serve them. The longer they sit in the sauce, the less crispy they’ll be.
Serve with ranch, blue cheese, carrots, and celery for the classic restaurant experience. And to help cool anyone’s mouth down when they can’t handle the heat!

Love this recipe? You may also enjoy these must have game day recipes:

Tell us what you think!

We hope you enjoy this recipe! When you try it out, please leave a review and a star rating in the comments below. Happy cooking! – Nicole and Alex

If you have any questions regarding the information presented in this post, please refer to our Nutrition Disclaimer here.

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Alex Langdon

As a kid, Alex was deemed the pickiest eater ever. That was at least, until he learned how to cook. While he always enjoyed cooking and eating good food growing up, the definition of good food was just really limited. Alex’s world of food quickly expanded in college as a way to get to know new friends. Now he’s constantly looking forward to finding new recipes and cuisines to try.

Alex is a mechanical engineer by degree, but a food blogger by reality. Even though engineering isn’t his day to day anymore, Alex has carried over many lessons learned from the engineering world to The Candid Cooks. With a very detail oriented, analytical mind, Alex thrives in the amount of data, science, and experimenting that comes with both cooking and running a website.

When Alex isn’t cooking or working on the blog, his favorite hobbies include playing soccer, running, hiking, reading a good book, or getting lost in a video game. Alex loves baking bread of all sorts, which is probably why pizza is one of his favorite foods to both make and eat!

5 from 3 votes (2 ratings without comment)