Air Fryer Falafel: Cheap, Easy, Tasty Recipe!

Yes, you can make falafel in minutes at home. Better yet, you can make this Middle Eastern recipe quickly in an air fryer. Chef and food writer Matt Degen shows how.

Also see:
Air fryer chickpeas: https://youtu.be/FQLCX2XpCLo?si=OPRg26yGlJf4fbGI

Air fryer croutons: https://youtu.be/l6H1pujPdCE?si=Ru15qLHOFQMWcEvU

How to cook beans from scratch: https://youtu.be/CzEjwT-EEqY?si=QXDeCCoEdQ2jYUju

Air Fryer Falafel Recipe ingredients:
1 cup soaked chickpeas
1/2 white onion
1 cup Italian parsley
2 teaspoons ground cumin
2 teaspoons ground coriander
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Ground black pepper to taste
1-2 tablespoons olive oil

Falafel is one of those recipes that sounds as exotic as it tastes maybe you’ve enjoyed Falafel tucked into some Peter bread or on its own drizzled with some tantalizing tahini sauce Falafel is one of those Foods that’s fun to order out but the thought of making it at home

May seem daunting well I’ve got good news it’s easier than you think especially my recipe in which we make it in one of these yes today we are going to turn the air fryer into a lawful making Machine hello and welcome to I want to cook my name is Chef Matt and this channel is all about helping you be a better cook and yes today we are making air fryer Falafel which may lead you to your first question what is falafel so Falafel is a famous Middle Eastern dish

That is traditionally made of ground up chickpeas or fava beans along with aromatics and herbs like parsley onions garlic and some spices like coriander and cumin the mixture is then formed into balls or patties and then cooked ideally you want it to have a nice crispy exterior and a soft interior

Falafel is great in a lot of ways but it’s also great for your budget this is a very cheap dish to make and it’s also nutrient rich and if you are vegan or glutenfree well good news it’s both now as I mentioned PHA primary ingredient is either going to be chickpeas or fava

Beans for this version we are going to use chickpeas which not to confuse you even more but chickpeas are also known as garbanzo beans so either of those that you find in the store are going to work they’re the same thing chickpeas equal garbanzo beans now Falafel is easy

To make and it doesn’t take long usually less than 30 minutes but it does require some planning that’s because for the chickpeas you want to use or the garbanzo beans again they’re the same you don’t want to use canned so don’t use these to make falafel it just the

Texture isn’t right so that means that you’re going to need to use these dried beans these dried garbanzo beans that you buy in the store and what you’ll need to do is put them in a big pot of water and soak them overnight you want

To soak these for about 18 to 24 hours to get them nice and puffed up nice and soaked you want them to absorb all that water but the good news is you don’t need to like cook those once they are done by cooking them in the air fryer

You are cooking them so all you have to do is soak them and then they will be ready to use for this recipe now Falafel is usually made by deep frying those balls or Patty in oil now I have made it this way and it can be really really

Good you get that nice crispy exterior but honestly that’s kind of a hassle if you’re kind of a newbie to deep frying well you kind of have to know what you’re doing otherwise things can fall apart and just getting all the oil out well again it can be a little bit of a

Hassle you can also make these in an oven and I’ve done it that way too but I found that kind of The Best of Both Worlds is using this air fryer because you get better crispness and well it’s just easy okay so let’s put it all

Together and before we get out the air fryer we’re using another Appliance a food processor I’m using my old vintage thrift store find this Hamilton Beach I love this thing it’s a tank so here’s how to put this all together we have rinsed our chickpeas they’ve dyed now

And we are going to use about let’s say a cup and again these are just those soaked chickpeas so we’re going to put those right into the food processor I’m also going to use about half an onion and two to three cloves of garlic uh

This is just a white onion that I’ve cut up we’ll put that in there we’re also going to use some flat leaf Italian parsley just put that in there uh again we’re going to use about a cup of that you don’t need to worry about exact

Ratios on this okay now we are going to add a few spices that’s really going to give it its nice punch and we are going to begin with cumin cumin is I love C maybe you’ve had this in some reff fried beans it’s just got this

Nice kind of spice and warmth to it so we’re going to use a couple teaspoons of cumin just kind of put it in there and we’re also going to use coriander we’re going to use a couple teaspoons of this as well just put it in there we’re going

To use about a teaspoon of kosher salt a little bit of cracked black pepper and for a little punch we’re going to use some cayenne pepper if you don’t like things spicy you don’t have to add this you can add maybe a half a teaspoon or if you’re like me and you

Like the spice you can add a little bit more so those are our main ingredients we’re also going to add a little bit of olive oil here I’m just going to drizzle this in this is going to help bind everything now I know that some recipes call for adding some flour or adding

Some baking powder to give it more fluffiness uh I found that this mixture doesn’t need it but by all means if you want to try that you can okay we have everything in our food processor so we are just going to pulse this until it is nice and ground up so here we Go okay and here’s the mixture this is kind of the consistency you want again it doesn’t have to be super fine but you do want it nice and ground up now we are going to form it into small balls and then put it in the air fryer okay so

Here we go I like to use an ice cream scoop for this and we are just going to make little balls if you’ve ever made like meat balls it’s the same process we just want to get these kind of nice and packed together and then you get these

Cute little balls and we are just going to place them in the air fryer and we are just going to do this until we have well my air fryer is a little bit small it only makes maybe half a dozen or so if you have a larger air fryer you can

Obviously fit more but this is going to make I think about 6 to n kind of depending on the size of the balls so we’re just going to put these together and you want to make sure to give them some space so here we go and here’s what it looks like when

It’s put together see we have these little balls there’s a seven that I fit in my air fryer and now one more thing we’re going to do before we actually start frying them is we are going to drizzle them with just a little bit of olive oil that’s going to help with the Browning now we air fry so for my model I like to do these for 15 minutes or so at about 400° of course you know always monitor it as it gets toward the end make sure nothing’s burning but for this I found that 400° 15 minutes works out just

About perfectly so let’s fry things Up While the flow is cooking I’m going to whip up a quick Tahiti sauce also in another thrift store food processor I found this little guy for $5 the other day and it’s great for whipping up little sauces like the heini so let’s do that Now okay you want to monitor these toward the end and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing and boy do they look good so you’re ready to see them all right here we go air fryer Falafel take a look at that doesn’t that look fantastic I mean we didn’t have to do

Any deep frying we didn’t enough to get out a bunch of oil and yet look at these guys boy I cannot wait to dive into them and here we are we have our air fryer Falafel with this homemade tahini sauce this took what like 20 minutes to make

H fantastic crispy on the outside nice and soft within as you can see you can make perfect fluffle in an air fryer so there you go with just a few simple ingredients a food processor and most importantly an air fryer you can make falafel anytime I hope you do with this

Recipe and by the way if you have any of those leftover chickpeas that you soaked well you can crisp those up and get crispy chickpeas in one of these too I made a whole video on that and I’ll put a link to that one in the description

Below okay trivia time last week I asked you to identify this crazy device and several of you got it right it is indeed a watermelon slicer it works kind of like a giant Apple Core you cut the watermelon so that it lays flat you just push this thing down and

Well you get equal slices of delicious watermelon for this week’s kitchen trivia we are headed back to the produce aisle and who is going to be able to identify this crazy type of pepper boy this shriveled thing it looks kind of like et’s finger if you know what this

Is or have a guess put it in the comments below and I will let you know the correct answer in the next video as always thank you for watching thank you for subscribing until next time I hope you want to Cook