Roasted pumpkin in Air Fryer

A real favorite for fall and winter days, roasted pumpkin is very easy to make in an air fryer. Let’s see how to make a perfect roasted pumpkin in an air fryer.

First of all, roasting pumpkin in an air fryer instead of a traditional oven has its pros and cons.

Perhaps the biggest pro is that an air fryer uses less energy, thus this is cheaper and more eco-friendly way of roasting your pumpkin. And of course if you don’t have a traditional oven, using an air fryer is a very convenient solution.

On the other hand, roasting pumpkin in an air fryer won’t be faster than using a traditional oven. Also because of the smaller size of air fryers you can only roast so much pumpkin at the same time, generally for a smaller crowd. On the pictures I roasted a half pumpkin, that’s what my relatively large air fryer was capable of handling.

Roasted Pumpkin Air Fryer Cooking Temperature and Time

When making any simple dish in an air fryer, the two most important factors are cooking temperature and cooking time. So it is when roasting pumpkins.

This depends of the size of the chunks of pumpkins, i.e. how large you cut them, and of course how roasted you like your pumpkins.

My recommendation is 375 F and 30 minutes. This way you don’t need to change the temperature during cooking. Also if you manage to put the pumpkin chunks vertically in the basket of your air fryer, you don’t even need to turn them or tweak them any other way.

I must add that if you want to roast your pumpkins faster, and you are ready to put in some extra work, then roast the pumpkins at 400 F first for 12 minutes, then lower the temperature to 355 F and continue cooking for another 10 minutes.

However you roast your pumpkins, at the end of the cooking time you should check the doneness with a fork.

An extra tip is to add 1-2 tablespoons of water to the basket of your air fryer. This won’t directly touch the pumpkins, so it won’t literally cook it but with the created steam your pumpkin will be much more moist and yummy.

Traditional Oven or Air Fryer

We tested the difference between roasting pumpkins in an air fryer and a traditional oven. To be specific, we roasted half of the same pumpkin in a normal oven and the other half in our Cosori Premium air fryer.

The first thing to note is how tasty your roasted pumpkin will be, here without the addition of any spices, depends much more of the variety of the pumpkin itself then on the method. So we recommend you to buy pumpkin at a place where you can be sure what they sell is a yummy variety.

Both methods produced very tasty roasted pumpkins, but they were somewhat different. Maybe the one in the air fryer had slightly more flavors.

The biggest difference was that while the pumpkin roasted in the traditional oven turned out to be more creamy at the end, the one roasted in the air fryer preserved more the original texture of the pumpkin. Pumpkins in the traditional oven stayed bigger, losing less water, while the ones roasted in the air fryer shrank more.