Air-Fryer Whole Roast Chicken

The whole roast chicken is the entry-level masterpiece of home cooking. Once you can roast a chicken — really roast it, with the skin shattering and the breast still moist — you can feed people. You can host. You can be the person who casually makes "just a chicken" on a Tuesday and have everyone leave saying it was the best meal of the week.

The air-fryer version of this dish is, surprisingly, the one a lot of home cooks now prefer. The conventional oven roast is forty-five minutes at 425°F plus a rest; the air fryer is fifty minutes at 360°F with vastly better skin crisping (the smaller chamber and direct heat crisp the skin like nothing else short of a deep-fry). The catch: you need a small-to-medium bird (3 to 3½ lb / 1.4–1.6 kg) — anything bigger won't fit in most baskets.

The single most important step is the dry-salt overnight. Pat the bird dry, salt it generously inside and out, set it on a rack uncovered in the fridge for 12–24 hours. The salt seasons deep into the meat, the skin loses moisture and tightens up, and what you get the next day is a chicken with shattering, glass-like skin. The photo shows it: deep amber bird being held on a black plate by hands in a denim apron, the skin crisp enough that you can almost hear it.