That’s why I recommend using a spray bottle to coat your breaded food items – so that you can evenly coat the crumbs with oil without over-doing it. If you have patches of dry crumbs when you put the chops into the air fryer, you’ll have patches of dry, flavorless crumbs when they are done. It’s important for the crumbs to be evenly coated with oil so that they brown and crisp well.

Once the chops are coated, place them into your air fryer basket and give them a good spray with oil. Push the crumbs onto the chops to make sure they are well coated. You can read all about breading and dredging in this cooking school lesson, but at the most basic level you need to know that you always start dredging or breading with flour, THEN egg, THEN crumbs. There is a right way to do this and it might not be naturally intuitive to you. Once we’ve brined our thick chops and ensured they will be juicy on the inside, it’s time to dredge and bread the chops so that they are crispy on the outside. That moisture and flavor remains in the chops when you cook and the increased moisture level makes it more difficult to over-cook the pork. When that happens, the flavors that you’ve put into your spice rub or salty marinade also get drawn into the meat and you’re left with pork chops that are seasoned on the inside. But then the movement of water reverses and the chops draw the moisture back in. Either way, the salt draws moisture out of (yes, out of) the chops. You can dry-brine the chops with a salty spice rub (as is the case with these Honey BBQ Pork Chops), or you can wet brine the chops with a salty water solution. If you brine chops that are 1-½ inches thick and then air fry them, you’re destined for a nice juicy pork chop dinner! Brining Pork Chopsīrining simply means to pre-salt your chops. Air frying is faster than baking because of the intense heat and as a result the chops don’t have as much time to dry out.

The third way to make juicy chops is to use your air fryer. Now, this does take some forethought since brining should really be done for a minimum of 6 hours, but it is so worth it in the end. The second way to avoid making dry pork chops is to brine the chops first.

Thicker pork chops, on the other hand, take longer to cook through, giving you enough time to get the exterior of the chops brown (or crispy if that’s what you’re going for) before they over-cook. Very thin pork chops cook all the way through and dry out before the outside really has time to brown. The first way to avoid dry chops is to buy thicker pork chops. While it is relatively easy to over-cook pork and dry it out, there are a few ways to easily avoid this problem in the kitchen and this recipe for air fryer breaded pork chops incorporates all of them. Dry pork chops haunt many cooks, but they needn’t.

Fried pork chops air fryer