The Must-Have Kitchen Appliance For Baked Potato Chips

Stroll through any grocery store, and there are a plethora of top-notch potato chip brands to choose from in the snack aisle. Even so, sometimes it pays off to make a batch of potato chips at home, which gives you full control of the flavor, salt levels, and how they're cooked. Frying potato chips is an obvious technique, but baking them is a little less messy. The key to making sure every chip crisps evenly in the oven, however, is to use your mandoline slicer. 

A mandoline slicer allows you to adjust the blade so you can cut the potato chips to your desired thickness. The perk is that every chip will be the same size, which is a hard task if you slice them by hand, even with the sharpest chef's knife. The reason it's so important with baked potato chips is that it ensures every inch of each chip will cook evenly in the oven, rather than having thicker parts that might be undercooked and thinner edges that are burnt. This works for both regular and sweet potato chips, depending on what you're craving. A mandoline slicer is also a handy tool if you want to deep fry the potato chips. 

Start with our Dutch-oven kettle chips with onion dip recipe, which are fried but can easily be baked to try this tip. It's up to you as to whether or not you peel the skin off of the potatoes or not. No matter your decision, wash the potatoes before you reach for the mandoline. Then, adjust the blade of the mandoline for your desired thickness of potato chip, ideally between 1/8th-inch to 1/16th-inch thick, for either variety of spud. Carefully slice the white potatoes or sweet potatoes against the mandoline, and don't put too much pressure against the potato as you slice. For safety, be sure to hold the potato with the palm of your hand, rather than your fingers, especially as you reach the end of the potato. This is a tip I learned in culinary school, and it should prevent any cuts.

As you cut the potatoes, put the slices in a bowl of cold water to extract excess starch so the baked chips come out of the oven crispy. Keep the slices in the water for up to 30 minutes, or simply rinse them, but dry them well before cooking, then coat in cooking spray or oil. And whether you want to keep the seasoning simple with just salt or slightly more complex with a homemade seasoning blend, toss the cooked, perfectly-cut and baked chips in the spices as soon as they come out of the oven.