Welcome to AirFryDay, where — you guessed it —every Friday Mashable covers the latest trends, dispenses advice, and reviews recipes for your air fryer.
I knew I was in for it the second I showed the TikTok to my boss: Simply put, a peanut butter-stuffed jalapeño is just too weird to not make it.
So yeah, to be blunt, my stomach was absolutely fucked the second my cursed For You Page surfaced that TikTok. My taste buds were in for a terrible afternoon.
Before we go any further, here's the TikTok in question. The user, @AirFryerGuy, sings through a recipe where you cut the tops of jalapeños, remove the seeds, stuff it with peanut butter, coat in breadcrumbs, then air fry it. It's been viewed roughly 128,000 times. As to why you'd stuff a hot pepper with jalapeño with peanut butter, that's between @AirFryerGuy and God. I'm just telling you the recipe.
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I've told you from the start that I did not like this recipe. And I love jalapeño. I use raw, sliced jalapeño in countless dishes. Roasted jalapeño? Fantastic. I hardly consider them spicy, but the spice isn't a problem for me either. So what I'm telling you is that this just isn't good. The best part of the TikTok is the catchy song. But if you must make it, if you are a sadist like me, here is the basic information.
Ingredients:
Jalapeños — I made four, but as many as you desire
All purpose flour — roughly 1 cup, seasoned with heavy pinches of salt and pepper
Eggs — 2, beaten until no streaks remain
Seasoned panko bread crumbs, roughly 1 cup
Peanut butter — whatever kind you prefer
Recipe
Note: @AirFryerGuy, though he sings about the basic steps, doesn't give exact details like cooking temperature or time, so I did the best I could to recreate his steps. My final product looked just like his. Here is what I did.
Cut the tops of the jalapeños
Scoop out the seeds and ribs of the pepper. I found this was easiest to do with a sharp paring knife.
Using the handle of spoon, or something similar, stuff as much peanut butter into the jalapeño as possible. As best you can, try to get peanut butter to the bottom of the pepper. This is easier to do if the jalapeños are straight and tougher to achieve if they curve at the bottom.
In three smalls bowls, lay out the seasoned flour, beaten eggs, and breadcrumbs, in that order.
Dip each stuffed jalapeño into the flour first. Coat it well. Then drench it in egg, then completely cover it with panko. Repeat this process for each jalapeño.
Toss the jalapeños into an air fryer set to 400 degrees. Cook until the breadcrumbs look on the verge of burning. For me this took fewer than four minutes.
This is not a particularly difficult recipe. To begin, I got everything prepped. That meant a clean cutting board. Seasoned flour, eggs, and panko breadcrumbs set out in bowls. Jalapeños washed and dried.
Then I chopped the tops of the peppers off and cored them, using a sharp paring knife. They looked like this.
I then got to work — gulp — stuffing them with peanut butter. A confession: Going into this adventure, I suspected peanut butter jalapeños wouldn't be great, so I stuffed two with PB and two with cream cheese, the more typical choice.
Here's how they looked stuffed.
Next up, it was time to bread the jalapeños. Each pepper got a coating of seasoned flour, then a bath in egg, then a heavy dose of panko breadcrumbs. One tip: Make sure to heavily coat the open end of the jalapeño. The breading will help keep the stuffing inside the pepper, functioning as a cap of sorts. Another tip: Raw jalapeño just is not great at holding a coating. The curved surface and somewhat slippery nature of the pepper's skin makes it tough to get the breading to stick. Your fingers might pull it off as you move the jalapeños, so pick them up daintily.
Here's how they looked coated in the air fryer basket.
My air fryer was set to 400 degrees, and I cooked the peppers for roughly three and a half minutes, including the time it took to preheat to 400. I just kept an eye on them, making sure the breadcrumbs didn't burn, which is really easy to do.
Here's the final product, cooked and — yikes — ready to eat. The browner breadcrumbs were just moments away from being scorched.
I let the peppers cool for a second then took a big honking bite out of a peanut butter pepper. In short: It was awful.
To be fair, the peanut butter wasn't as bad a pairing with the jalapeño as I anticipated, but I expected it to be downright terrible. The sweetness and creaminess of the PB did offset some of the spice, and it did provide a texture counterpoint to the crunch of the breading and jalapeño. This is a pairing that exists elsewhere, in other recipes. But it just doesn't work, like at all, in this recipe. Neither did the cream cheese, to be honest. And it's hard to make me not like cheese and jalapeño. Like almost impossible.
Here's why the recipe doesn't work: The dirty secret of cooking is that it's mostly organization and timing. You need to cook each component of a dish correctly for the right amount of time, at the right temperature. The breadcrumb coating and creamy fillings were always going to finish cooking much faster than a raw jalapeño.
The outside and inside of the dish were cooked well, the jalapeño was basically freaking raw. It's unpleasant to eat. If you don't like spice you better hope you got a mild jalapeño. I'm addicted to spice and still, it's just not nice to bite into a whole ass, raw jalapeño. And then, once you get through that, your taste buds are blitzed with hot peanut butter? It's gross. Not to mention, the breading falls off pretty much the second you pick up the jalapeño or cut into it.
This recipe follows a similar process to the air fried Babybel wheels I made for a different AirFryDay. That should tell you something. Melting cheese and fully cooking a jalapeño simply should not follow the same steps.
Here's my cutting board, littered with chopped up jalapeños, me doing my best to find a good bite. A good bite did not exist.
I could see improving on this dish. Personally, I would ditch the peanut butter for cream cheese, but to each their own. But I think if you air fried the jalapeño first, basically to the point of its skin blistering — then breaded and stuffed it, you might have better luck. Or you could use a batter — something like the batter from this cauliflower wing recipe — instead of breadcrumbs and have a better shot at cooking all parts of the dish evenly.
But as this recipe from @AirFryerGuy stands, it just doesn't work. Peanut butter and jalapeño ain't for me, but raw, thick jalapeño stuffed with nut butter especially ain't for me.
Let's keep things vague, but let's just say my digestive tract suffered from this dish. Suffered mightily.
So yeah, I wouldn't recommend you make this recipe. And if you insist on doing it, don't say I didn't warn you.