Air-Fryer Pizza Bagel Bites

The pizza bagel is the unofficial mascot of after-school food, of sleepovers, of the freezer aisle at any grocery store in the country. The frozen-bites version, in their little square cardboard box, has a charm but also a meat-grinder-of-a-recipe vibe — they're tiny, they're salty, they burn the roof of your mouth in a predictable order. Made fresh on actual mini bagels, they retain everything that was good about the freezer-aisle ancestor and lose what wasn't.

The photo is the assembled, just-cooked stack: six mini bagels (or three bagels halved), generous marinara, shredded mozzarella, a scatter of dried oregano, the cheese bubbled and pulling away at the edges where it touched the basket. The bagels stay structural on the bottom and chewy in the middle — they don't go soggy under the sauce because the air fryer pulls the moisture out instead of sealing it in like an oven would.

This is the platonic recipe but it adapts cheerfully. Pepperoni rounds on top, sliced olives, mini meatball halves, jarred giardiniera. Don't overload the bagel — anything piled higher than the cheese will spill into the basket and become a small fire later. Keep it modest. Make two batches.