Welcome to the Suburban Frontier as I share my experiments, successes, and failures while learning more about clean living, organic eating and gardening, and easy and delicious nutrition. I will share what I have learned and recipes along the way. Stop back every day for more fun!

Sunday, October 28, 2012

In the Kitchen- Homemade Potato & Sweet Potato Chips

We sort of miss potato chips at our house.  I know that many are loaded with MSG and a lot of other stuff that I don't want to miss but we are certainly not "anti-foods"... we are just "anti-manufactured" foods.  The salty crunch of a potato chip sounded wonderful this weekend so I did some research and experimentation..  funny that you can make about anything at home, and BETTER, that you can buy at the store.  The one thing about homemade food is that it won't last on the shelf in a little plastic wrapper for years.. sorry.  Most of it has to be refrigerated, canned, frozen, or better yet, EATEN!

Journey is not fond of sweet potatoes (yet).. so she wanted "regular" chips.  So I made a few batches of chips.. one for her and 2 sweet potato recipes for the adults in the house.  Sweet potatoes have much more nutrition than a regular white potato, but white potatoes should not be vilified.. there is certainly some nutritional value in them, especially if you leave the skins on.

Begin by washing your potatoes.  The Microfiber Fruit and Veggie Scrubbing Cloth I use does an awesome job... really takes off the dirt and a bit of the loose skin.

For the regular potato chips, all I did was slice the potatoes very thin and lay them out on a baking sheet sprayed with olive oil.  Then I sprayed the tops of the potato slices with more olive oil and put some seasoning on them.  For my first batch I just used mineral salt and pepper.  Then baked them in the oven at about 300 degrees until they became browned and crispy.  This did not take a long time but depends totally on how thin you can slice your potatoes.  Some of mine were thinner than others so I had to pull the thinnest ones out earlier than the meatier slices and continue cooking them.  Journey LOVED her new potato chips!
The regular potato chips are on the left and the first batch of sweet potato chips on the right.
For the Sweet Potato Chips I tried a few different methods and will share my results.  I first washed the potatoes and cut away any bad spots.

I tried a manual food processor for slicing first but did not like the inconsistent results I got with it.  Some of the potatoes were super thin and some were thick.  So I moved to a Mandolin Slicer in hopes of getting consistent thin slices.
The Mandolin Slicer cut them consistently and fairly easily but it turned out that I could not get thin enough slices with it, so my potato slices were too thick to turn out as good as I hoped... but we are on the right track.  I have to keep searching for the perfect slicing tool.  Maybe it will have to be that evil old food processor that sprayed pumpkin guts all over my kitchen.. I don't know yet.

When you have your slices of sweet potatoes in a bowl like this, you then mix up
1/2 cup olive oil
2 tsp salt (use the good kind with minerals or sea salt at least)
1/4 tsp cayenne (optional - we omitted it because we don't like ours that spicy)
1 tsp Real Maple syrup (you could use some brown sugar instead if you want)
1/2 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp chili powder

I mixed all of this together in the magic bullet to mix well (this made plenty to cover the slices made by 2 sweet potatoes.. next time I will cut back on the amount of olive oil).

Pour this into the bowl of sweet potato slices and thoroughly mix it up with your hands, making sure every potato is covered on both sides.

Lay the potatoes out on a cookie sheet and bake at about 200 degrees for a few hours.. 1 - 2 ought to do it.  I checked on them a lot and turned them so they would cook evenly.  They taste great but since my slices were a little thicker than ideal, they are a bit chewier than crispier like I would have liked them.  It takes a bit of experimenting in the kitchen to get good results when cooking new foods. 

No comments:

Post a Comment