Air Fryer Sweet and Sour Chicken

Transform frozen chicken breast chunks into a macro friendly, flavor packed meal in under 30 minutes with this air fryer sweet and sour chicken recipe. It’s as easy as air frying frozen chicken and vegetables together while you whip up a low calorie sweet and sour sauce.

Every serving has 15 grams of protein with only 6 grams of fat and 200 calories. That leaves plenty of room for serving with rice or cauliflower rice to make a complete meal.

Ingredients for Air Fryer Sweet and Sour Chicken

Like I mentioned, this recipe takes a shortcut with frozen chicken. Here’s everything else you’ll need:

• Frozen Lightly Breaded Chicken Breast Chunks – I used Just Bare from Costco, but I’ve used a similar Perdue Farms product to make my honey sesame chicken and the Kirkland chicken to make my sheet pan buffalo chicken and cauliflower. They also make lightly breaded tenders you could cut into pieces.
• Red Bell Pepper
• Green Bell Pepper
• 1/2 a Sweet Onion

The vegetables are optional, but they add a ton of volume to the meal and increase the size of each serving.

What About Fresh Chicken Breast?

If you can’t find lightly breaded frozen chicken, you could make something like these crispy air fried chicken nuggets. Though if you go that route, you’ll want to cook them on their own without the veggies first.

You could also go with a non-breaded chicken option. Check out my sweet chili air fryer chicken and brussels or air fried Greek chicken and veggies recipes for examples of air frying everything together.

For the Healthy Sweet and Sour Sauce

Traditional sweet and sour sauce is essentially a 1:1 blend of granulated white sugar and vinegar. Coloring or other added ingredients lend the deep red flavor you see in most Chinese American sweet and sour chicken dishes.

My sauce uses a common ingredient—ketchup—for a bit of red color but primarily sweetness to balance out the vinegar. Here’s everything you’ll need for the sauce:

• Canned Pineapple Chunks in Juice
• Sugar Free Ketchup
• Honey
• Rice Vinegar
• Low Sodium Soy Sauce
• Corn Starch

If you like an extra sour sauce, you can omit the honey or increase the vinegar by a teaspoon or two. I thoroughly enjoyed testing different ingredient ratios. Tinkering is encouraged!

How to Make Sweet and Sour Chicken in an Air Fryer

I used an Instant Vortex Pro Air Fryer for this recipe, which has two racks to divide the frozen chicken and vegetables. If you’re using a single-basket air fryer, I would start the chicken on its own before adding the vegetables (about halfway through) to finish cooking.

Every air fryer is a bit different, so you may need to adjust cook times slightly. You’re looking for crispy golden brown chicken that’s fully reheated and tender crisp vegetables. Some charring on the vegetables is okay, but you don’t want to completely fry and start to dry them out.

If it’s easier, you can always sauté the veggies in a pan while the chicken is in the air fryer.

Speaking of, you’ll technically need a pan or saucepan to reduce the sauce. The sauce lacks the viscosity to be brushed on in the air fryer like my chili garlic air fryer chicken and broccoli. Though I really think it’s no big deal since you would need to dirty a bowl or dish to toss everything together anyway.

Have any other questions about this air fryer sweet and sour chicken recipe? Leave them in the comments below and I’ll be sure to help you out. And once you try this recipe out, I’d love to hear your thoughts about it in a recipe review. I hope you enjoy it!