I have been thinking. Let's say there are chicken drumsticks:
- If I marinate an entire drumstick, it will only penetrate the outer layer of the meat. The inside would still be normal chicken flavor, unsalted.
- If I cut the drumsticks to many small pieces, the marinate can go through. But that is a lot of work, and not easy to store in frozen bags. I usually store the drumsticks in whole, at least they stick as drumsticks, easy to defrost later. If I store a bag of chicken pieces, they will clump together, making them hard to defrost, especially in microwave as they can be cooked through before defrost.
So I came up with an idea. Studying Chinese cooking techniques, I saw that they cook meat, vegetables, anything that takes a while to cook first. Then those are put aside to make the sauce. So I did just that. I cooked the meat first, whether is cut or whole, in an air fryer. Separately, on the stovetop, I heated up a pan, made a sauce out of oyster sauce, some chilli and paprika. Then I basted the sauce on top of cooked meat, as in putting the meat in the pan, pouring the cooked sauce on with a spoon. This is like basting a steak. Then meat went back to the air fryer to finish cooking. Voila, no different than cooking everything on a pan. What's more, cooking in an air fryer feels less oily on food, food is less dried I think.
So give it a try.