Air-fried Oreos from viral TikTok is a truly unnecessary, unappetizing mess

Not everything needs to be a Thing. Less can be more.

What I'm saying is, you can just eat a normal, tasty Oreo instead of dousing it pancake batter and then air frying it. Oreos are delicious.

I tested out a viral TikTok recipe, posted by the user @hasaneats on TikTok, that promised air-fried Oreos in just three minutes. It's racked up 7.7 million views, so you'd think it was decent. You'd be thinking incorrectly.

It's not that the recipe was the grossest thing I've ever eaten. It's that it took a perfectly good thing — an Oreo — and made it less tasty, more expensive, and far more complicated. But hey, here's how to make it, if you want to make the same mistake that I did.

Ingredients

• Oreo(s)

• Boxed pancake mix

• Milk

Directions

1. Pour pancake mix into a mixing bowl.

2. Add milk to the pancake mix until you have a very thick batter. The TikTok from @hasaneats did not have specific measurements, but roughly a quarter cup of milk should be more than enough. The batter should be far thicker than you'd like for pancakes.

3. Dip the Oreo(s) into the batter, covering fully.

4. Air fry at 390 degrees for three minutes.

Sometimes less is more. Credit: Screenshots: TikTok / @hasaneats

The details

I don't know what to tell you. It's an overcooked pancake covering a melty Oreo. Clearly, the intended goal is the carnival-style, deep-fried Oreo that people crave. This is not that.

But a few words of advice. If you do decide to make this recipe, make the batter thicker than you think you need. My batter felt incredibly thick but was still runny enough that it actually dripped a tiny bit off the Oreo and cooked around the holes in the grate of my air fryer. That made the Oreos super annoying to remove from the air fryer once they were finished cooking.

Here's how my Oreos looked as they went into the air fryer.

The batter seemed thick enough here, but it was not. Credit: Mashable

Otherwise this recipe is really easy. There's not much to it. Here's how my final product looked.

Not great. Credit: Mashable

Here is the interior of an Oreo after a bite.

Why not just eat an Oreo? Credit: Mashable

Again, this wasn't gross, like certain other things I've consumed for Mashable. The melty Oreo portion of bite was actually half pleasant. The problem was the melty Oreo was covered in poorly cooked pancake.

Now, the Oreos could have used less time in the air fryer. And the original TikTok from @hasaneats also topped the air-fried cookies with powdered sugar, which I did not end up doing. But I don't think less cook time or more sugar would fix this recipe. It's fundamentally flawed.

The beauty of an Oreo is that it pairs the crisp, chocolate cookie with an airy, fatty cream center. The pancake batter adds a dense shell to the Oreo and there simply isn't enough cream — even in the Double Stuffs I bought to balance that out. It's just doing too much, and making a mess, for no reason at all.

Just eat a normal Oreo instead and save yourself the dishes.