Meat lovers alert! Your favorite steak dinner is now the ultimate party food. Air-fried to juicy perfection and tossed in warm garlic butter, these irresistible steak bites will be the star at your next party. Your air fryer won’t be able to keep up.
Preheating the air fryer for at least 5 minutes ensures the steak will get a great sear from the sizzling hot basket, and flipping the steak after 2 minutes means it will cook evenly on both sides, giving each bite a perfectly pink center.
Read on for more tips on these bite-sized appetizers. Looking for more air fryer favorites? Check out these tostones.
What cut of meat are we using?
When we’re cooking in a cast-iron pan, we love a juicy ribeye, but here we’re opting for its leaner cousin, the New York strip. This cut promises tender, juicy steak bites without the difficulty of large fat pockets, which won’t easily render in the air fryer. If you can’t get New York strip, you can also use sirloin.
Why are we trimming the fat?
It’s easy to render extra fat when you’re searing steak in a pan, but in the air fryer, when the bites are cooking in just a few minutes without the intense direct heat of a pan, it’s a little more tricky. Rather than risking chunks of unrendered fat in our steak bites (ew!), we suggest trimming it off before cooking.
Why aren’t we spraying the steak bites with oil before air-frying them?
When we're searing a steak on the stove, we always add a little oil to the pan to help create that deeply flavorful caramelized crust, but oddly enough, we found that these air-fried bites caramelize and taste better overall when we left out the oil and simply tossed them with a little Worcestershire sauce in addition to salt and pepper.
Made these? Let us know how it went in the comments below.
