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Air Fryer Salmon Bites with Garlic Cream Sauce

Eight minutes in the basket, caramelized outside and barely set within, with a lemon-garlic cream to dip.

Prep
15 min
Cook
8 min
Makes
Serves 4
Jump to the recipe
Pieces of cooked salmon scattered with chives
Photo: Wow_Pho / Pixabay

Salmon has a very short window. Its proteins begin to firm at around 50°C and by 60°C they have squeezed out the white albumin you see leaking from overcooked fillets. Cut into 3 cm cubes, the whole thing happens in about eight minutes at 200°C, and the difference between right and dry is roughly ninety seconds.

Cube it evenly. This sounds like pedantry until you have a batch where the small pieces are chalky and the large ones are raw. Aim for uniformity over any particular size.

Pat the cubes bone dry and use honey in the marinade. Air fryers have no oil to conduct heat, so browning depends entirely on sugar and surface dryness. Honey caramelizes fast at 200°C and gives the lacquered edges the whole dish depends on.

If you want something punchier to dip into, burger sauce works here too.

The sauce is made cold, in the time the salmon cooks, and it should be sharper than seems reasonable — it is a foil for rich fish, not a companion to it.

A jug of garlic cream sauce with dill and a garlic bulb
Photo: Nordwing / Pixabay

Salmon bites and cream sauce: the card

Eight minutes in the basket, caramelized outside and barely set within, with a lemon-garlic cream to dip.

Salmon, and the garlic cream sauce

For the salmon

  • 1½ lb (700 g) skinless salmon fillet, cut into 3 cm cubes
  • 1 tbsp olive oil
  • 1 tbsp honey
  • 1 tsp smoked paprika
  • 1 tsp garlic powder
  • 1 tsp fine salt
  • ½ tsp black pepper

For the garlic cream sauce

  • ⅔ cup (150 g) sour cream
  • 3 tbsp mayonnaise
  • 2 garlic cloves, crushed to a paste with salt
  • Juice and zest of 1 lemon
  • 2 tbsp chopped dill
  • 1 tsp Dijon mustard

Eight minutes in the basket

  1. 1 Pat the salmon cubes thoroughly dry. Toss with the oil, honey and seasonings until evenly coated.
  2. 2 Stir the sauce ingredients together and refrigerate while the salmon cooks. Crushing the garlic with salt rather than mincing it gives a smoother, less aggressive flavor.
  3. 3 Heat the air fryer to 400°F (200°C). Arrange the cubes in a single layer with space between them — crowded, they steam.
  4. 4 Cook 7–8 minutes, shaking once at the halfway point. They are done when the outside is lacquered and the center is just opaque. If in doubt, take them out: they carry on cooking for a minute after.
  5. 5 Serve immediately with the cold sauce.

On frozen fish

  • Frozen salmon works if thawed fully and dried hard. Any surface water steams and you lose the caramelized edge.
  • The sauce keeps three days and is good on anything fried.

Knowing when air fryer salmon is done

The outside is browned and the center is just turning opaque, still slightly translucent at the very middle. That is around 50°C. Cooked until uniformly opaque, salmon is already dry.