These super easy and delicious apple turnovers are made in the air fryer, but can also be made in a regular oven. In my never ending quest to make more air fryer recipes I thought this was a great one to add.

Air fryer apple turnovers

Now I had not made apple turnovers myself up until this particular moment. And I can’t believe how simple it is to make! I had a large batch of apples so I made apple sauce and apple compote and while I love eating it by the spoonful it seemed a better idea to create something else with it. And so I remembered I had wanted to try making apple turnovers in the air fryer. And so I did!

What goes into the turnovers?

Once you’ve made the apple compote, you really only need 2 ingredients for making these. You need the compote plus puff pastry sheets. In addition you might want to also use some egg wash and maybe a little brown sugar for the tops of the turnovers. But that’s it.

Instead of the apple compote you can also use apple pie filling for this. Or if you don’t have either simply mix some diced apples with a little bit of cinnamon, lemon juice, white sugar, raisins (i like using raisins as they soak up the liquid from the apples) in a large bowl. If you want them softer you can place the apples inside a medium saucepan and bake until they soften.

How to make

Now it’s time to make your apple turnovers. I used equal squares of puff pastry sheets so they just needed to be turned over, so that was all that was needed. They had to be defrosted first of course and it helps if you don’t let them defrost all the way. That makes handling them once filled easier. If you do not have square sheets you can take a large sheet of puff pastry and just cut it into the required sizes. A pizza cutter usually works really well for that.

Folding

Place the sheets on a lightly floured surface and imagine a diagonal line in the middle of each square. Now place a little bit of apple mixture on one end of the diagonal and fold the other one over. You will now have a triangle shape. Using a little bit of the beaten egg to seal the edges of the pastry and brush some of the egg wash on the tops of each turnover too.

Now for me the biggest challenge in making these air fryer apple turnovers was the air fryer basket. Initially I wanted to bake a couple at the same time but it is really hard to place them in a single layer. So I went with baking two at the same time. Obviously this depends largely on the size of your air fryer. Mine was a Philips XL but I know there are much bigger ones available these days. But if you have a smaller air fryer it might actually be easier baking them in an oven.

In the oven

If you don’t have an air fryer, simply place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper and bake in the oven at 180˚C (350˚F) for about 20 minutes or until golden brown.

In the air fryer they need about 10-12 minutes. Be careful when taking them out of the basket as that will be pretty hot. It would be easiest if you have one of those handy inserts so you can place the turnovers in and than place the insert into the air fryer.That would be easier than fiddling with a hot basket like I did.

As the end result my apple turnovers where a little wonky as you can see but boy they were so good! While I loved them hot, I thought they were maybe even better at room temperature. The flaky puff pastry combined with the delicious and sweet apple filling was just perfection. I can see they would work really well with maybe something like whipped cream or ice cream too. But then I like everything with whipped cream so maybe that doesn’t count.