Frozen Chicken Legs in Air Fryer

Air fryer frozen chicken legs come out tender and juicy inside with crispy skin outside. If your family loves drumsticks for the dinner and our Frozen Chicken Legs Instant Pot was a hit, this one is even better!

Air Fryer Frozen Chicken Legs Recipe

You may have cooked legs already defrosted before, but we all have forgetful moments right? If you too realized that it is 4pm and your poultry is still rock hard, no worries. If you follow these directions, or our air fryer frozen chicken thighs instructions you’ll have a complete meal and nobody will know what happened.

in Ninja Foodi

You can use any brand you might have at home. I have three different models because I like to make sure there is no difference in temperatures or cook times. Use your AirWave, Cosori or make as a Ninja Foodi recipe. Key is to make sure they aren’t overlapping. Those babies need hot air flow all over to get to perfect.

Cooking frozen meat this way will work whether you bought these in the freezer section, or found them on sale and froze them yourself. The key to success is to separate them from one another. Typically you can run them under warm water and pull them apart. If not, just place the brick into the air fryer basket while it’s preheating and that will work too.

Ingredients

1. Chicken drumsticks frozen, skin on is ideal
2. Seasonings of your choice, salt and pepper are a given but I’d suggest Lawry’s seasoned salt too for more flavor
3. Olive oil spray is key to staying moist on the outside and getting crispy at the end

Optional

I mean you don’t have to brush barbecue sauce on at the end but if you do the skin will have a killer flavor. It will get kinda’ baked on and crispy too which kinda’ caramelizes and OMG I can taste it now so I better stop.

We have followed similar steps when making frozen chicken wings in air fryer as well. Total game changer when you have people over for the big game. 😉 You can make these and for the kids, frozen chicken tenders in air fryer are always a hit.

You can jump to recipe card at the bottom of this post but….. Here is a quick step by step so you can get the gist of what I mean. It isn’t difficult at all and you’ll be surprised at how it would be hard to tell the difference if you had fresh at the beginning vs. rock hard.

How to Cook Air Fryer Frozen Chicken Drumsticks

Spray the inside of your basket with olive oil and then set drumsticks in the air fryer basket in a single layer like you see here. You can put a bit of seasonings on at the very beginning or wait until the point where you flip them over. That way the outside has defrosted a bit and it will stick a bit better.

I did not preheat this time, instead I think in this case it was better to not. As the machine warms up it gives the meat an opportunity to thaw and defrost before cooking. You can sprinkle 1/3 of seasoning on top, then flip the chicken legs over.

Use tongs to flip the chicken legs over. I suggest that you spray tops with olive oil to add moisture and this will help the skins to crisp up as much as possible. If you want to add bbq sauce air fry this on during the last 5 minutes or so until crispy on the outside and internal temp reaches 165 degrees F.

You should always use a digital meat thermometer in the thickest part of the meat to ensure it is to the min. internal temperature. Timing will vary depending on the size of the chicken. I always suggest medium to begin with.

Only have an Instant Pot air fryer lid? NO problem. This is How to Cook Frozen Chicken all different ways. With this you just use the lid that sits on top of the pot and crisp the tops at 380 F for about 3 minutes on each side.

Just in case you made too many, we have a ton of leftover chicken recipes to choose from the next day. I hate wasting food so whether you make these naked drumsticks or air fryer turkey legs you can use the meat to make dinner the next night. That means two for one meals which saves $.