Successful Chips

A few months ago, I tried making Rosemary Potato Chips. I believe you can read about that adventure here. Anyway, a friend of mine suggested that I get a good Mandoline cutter thingy from Ross – Dress For Less (which suprisingly has cookware). We first looked at the Chefworks store. They were selling mandolines starting at $50 and going up to over $100. Of course, Chefworks sells high quality resturaunt-quality cookware which can be very pricey. So, we went to Ross and got a $5 mandoline. I haven’t got a chance to try it for almost two-three weeks but today finally tried it out.

The blade was razor sharp and cut through the potatoes like soap cuts through grease. The only problem I noticed was that the mandoline cut the potatoes rather thick ’cause the platform where you put the potato on was quite a bit below the blade and therefor cut 1/6″ slices. Way too thick. Anyway, the slices were cut evenly which was promising. So, I tossed the potatoes in oil and stuck ‘em in the hot 400 degree oven (when I made chips last time, the oven was set to 325 when it should be set to something more like 380-400). After 20 minutes, they still looked pretty raw and the only parts that were brown were the edges. So that didn’t really work. I tried it again and set the temp to 500 degrees. That was a bit better. Some parts got crunchy but it still just wasn’t right. It was crunchy, not crispy. I realized that the mandoline sliced ‘em too thick and the platform couldn’t be adjusted (meaning I couldn’t raise it). However, I found out that it could be taken off.

What I thought I could do was to put something on the grooves where the platform rests on to raise it. Since I didn’t want to go downstairs to look for wood to use as the lift, I looked in the garbage. I saw the “spine” of a check book (the part where all the checks are glued together) which was just the right thickness. I cut it up into squares. After fitting the squares under the plateform, I sliced a potato on it. It sliced the potato so fine and paper thin, if I didn’t see the potato slice drop into the bowl, I wouldn’t even be able to tell that it even sliced the potato. I mean I could see through the potato slice. After looking at the slices, I knew that this next batch would be the one. I briskly dipped the slices in canola oil, sprinkled a fair amount of rosemary on ‘em and stuck ‘em in the oven. 10 minutes later, they were done! Not only that, they were cooked rather evenly. The the texture was so delicate they melted in the mouth! They also even tasted like kettle chips. They didn’t taste like oven baked chips which was interesting.