Crispy, Non-Fried Potato Chips

Potatoes waiting to be sliced.

On Monday I made homemade potato chips.  How cool!  I used the recipe in the book The Homemade Pantry by Alana Chernila. 

The recipe calls for 1.5 pounds of potatoes (four medium Russet potatoes for me), which I weighed out on my kitchen scale.  If you don't have a kitchen scale, you've got to get one!  Mine is digital and you can easily switch between pounds/ounces and grams and it also has a 'tare' function to reset the scale back to zero as you add more items.  And the weight limit is awesome, I think it goes up to 15 pounds or something.  A high weight limit is good when you're using heavy crockery bowls.  And that's another thing, my previous scale could only be used by weighing in its little cup, which was difficult to use when weighing something long like spaghetti noodles.  So having a scale with a pedestal where you can weigh with any

A nice thin slice.

You start out by cleaning your potatoes and slicing them thin. I used setting #2 on my mandoline. I don't think I would have tackled this if I didn't have a mandoline, I wouldn't have the patience or skill to slice them thin enough with a regular knife.  I have a cheap Progressive adjust-a-slice mandoline and it's great.  I did research when I was originally looking for a mandoline and this one was a decent choice. It's nice and wide, I don't understand why some slicers are so narrow.  The only thing I don't like about it is the food gripper because it doesn't firmly hold anything I've tried with it and the food slides around, which is actually more unsafe.  So I live life dangerously and just hold the food I'm slicing in my bare hand and stop before I get near the end.  Yeah, there's some waste since I can't use the whole food item, but it's better than losing a fingertip. 

Soaking the slices in salted water for 5 minutes.

The thin slices of potato are soaked in salted water, I think this is to draw out the starch. 

After the soaking, you drain and dry off the potato slices using a towel.  You have to make sure you dry them well since any remaining moisture is going to steam your potatoes and they'll take a long time to crisp up.

Potato slices waiting to go in the oven. 

Mural of Flavor salt-free herb blend

Once dried, then you drizzle the potato slices with olive oil, salt them a bit, and layer them on oiled cookie sheets.  At this point I decided to try vary the flavor on half of the chips, so I added Penzey's Spices Mural of Flavor herbal blend. 

Making chips is quick on the front end, not a whole lot of prep, but it is 45 minutes the oven, so it's perfect for the colder months.  It would be way too hot to bake that long in the summer though! 

The finished chips. 

Bake 400 degrees for 15 minutes, then rotate the cookie sheets and turn the oven down to 300 degrees.  Bake for 15 minutes and rotate again.  Bake for yet another 15 minutes and be sure to watch them and make sure they don't get too dark.  Some of mine are a little too dark, but luckily Jeff and I liked them a little darker.  I thought I might need to flip the chips so they would get crispy but the instructions didn't call for it so I didn't and they were fine.  I thought they also might bake onto the cookie sheet, but I used a spatula and they came off fine. 

Verdict:
We loved these!  This was an awesome treat and a much healthier version of potato chips.  We don't normally have potato chips at home mainly because they are unhealthy and we would rather have tortilla chips instead, but it was so awesome to know they weren't fried and I knew exactly what was in them.