Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Guilt-free, fat-free homemade potato chips

One of the best birthday gifts ever?  The TopChips my husband got me last week.  You can make potato, sweet potato, even apple, pear, carrot or mango chips in your microwave without any added oil or fat, and they come out SOOOOO crispy and perfect, it's amazing.

I've made sweet potato oven fries before, but you have to bake them so hot, and in this summer weather, who wants to turn on the oven to 450 degrees?  and if you make wedges, they never get crispy, whereas the thin sliced ones go from barely stiff to black-burned in about 2.1 seconds.  Solution?  the microwave!

The TopChips is a silicon tray like you see in this top photo-- you can stack them, but then you have to rotate the top and bottom tray halfway through so they all get maximum crispiness.  Since it takes just 4 min (in my microwave) to do a single tray, that's what I do.

The only other thing that makes this process fast and easy is a mandoline, which lets you slice the potato very thinly and quickly.  You could do it with a knife but the results won't be as uniform (or as crispy, I think.)

Here's my hubby, laying out the potato slices on the TopChips.. the mandoline propped up on the cutting board right behind.


The two trays, stacked, in the microwave.  We experimented with salt, garlic salt, and ended up liking things plain or with a little bit of salt.  Surprisingly, the flavor of the potato was enough.  But I bet a little curry, cayenne, taco seasoning or the like would be good.  Chili powder on a mango slice sounds awesome, as does cinnamon on apple slices..


This is how thin the mandoline makes the slices, and the chips come out of the microwave SOOOO lusciously crunchy and crisp!  They're heaven!


We made a whole BOWL full of sweet potato chips from one smallish sweet potato.  Really yummy even without any added flavoring or seasoning.  The healthiest snack food I can imagine!  (Sweet potatoes are Paleo friendly especially for athletes.  Potatoes are not.)



You can buy a set of two trays on Amazon for about $25.

1 comment:

Pete said...

Sounds great! Almost worth getting a microwave...we haven't had one in...probably 10 years