Homemade Potato Chips

Last night I decided to try my hand at homemade potato chips.  We were having hamburgers for dinner and I decided that potato chips might be a fun change.  DH would normally make french fries for us, but potato chips have been off the "approved foods" grocery list for quite a while now and I think we all miss them.  I'm excited to share how to make them with you, because they were wonderful - light, crispy and delicious - everything a potato chip should be, without any yucky hydrogenated fats or added chemicals.  I normally like to use a lot of pictures, but I didn't think about it until I was almost finished.  Besides, I'm pretty sure y'all don't need a picture of a pile of potato slices to know what one should look like ;0)

Ingredients:

Potatoes
Oil for frying (I use Peanut)
Sea Salt

• Peel potatoes, if desired.  I left the skins on mine and no one complained.
• Slice potatoes thinly using mandolin slicer - unless you are a knife magician and can slice your potatoes both thinly (is thinly a word?) and uniformly, which I cannot do.  (Well, maybe I could with some practice, but I have a mandolin, so what would be the point?)
• Plop the potato slices into a bowl of cold water as you go and allow them to soak in cold water for 30 minutes prior to frying.  This step draws the starch from the potatoes and they fry up crispier.
• Heat about an inch of oil in frying pan.  Some of the recipes I saw say to heat the oil to 375 degrees.  None of my thermometers go up that high, so I do the toothpick test.  (Stick a toothpick in the oil, touching the bottom of pan - if bubbles form around the toothpick your oil is hot enough.)  I prefer the toothpick test to the "drop of water in the oil" test, which is also effective.
• While oil is heating, lay out paper towels on the counter, arrange your potato slices individually and cover with another sheet of paper towels, blotting to dry.  Leave the potatoes covered until ready to fry.
• Gently slide each potato slice into the oil and fry until golden brown.  I try to turn them, but don't worry if you miss some, they seem to turn out fine.
• Remove from oil using a slotted spoon, place on clean, dry paper towels and sprinkle with sea salt immediately.  (This is probably NOT the recipe to try if you are running low on paper towels!)
• Continue the process until you are finished.  (It goes faster if you solicit an extra set of hands to add more potato slices to the hot oil as you are removing and salting them.)

I put each batch into paper towel-lined bowls in the warm oven to keep them warm and crispy until they were all finished.

That is all there is to it.  Kind of.  The truth is, this potato chip thing turned into a two day adventure for me.  You see, I sliced up too many potatoes.  My general rule of thumb for potatoes (mashed, scalloped, etc.) is to cook 1 for each family member.  That is WAY too many potatoes if you only intend to make enough to go along with hamburgers for dinner.  By the time I got all of the potatoes in the bowls above finished I was well and truly sick of frying potato chips.  I had read that you can soak the potato slices in vinegar to make salt and vinegar chips, which DH happens to LOVE.  So I thought, I'll just pour vinegar over the rest of the uncooked slices, let them soak until tomorrow and make a snack that will make my man fall in love with me all over again.  (I'm convinced that my cooking has that power, after all...)

So, Day 2:

This afternoon I pulled out the vinegar-y potato slices, went through MORE paper towels, reheated my oil and got to frying.  Whoa.  Pungent aroma alert!  When the first batch of chips were fried and salted, it was taste test time.  The verdict?  Not vinegar-y enough.  After the initial stab of disappointment passed, I realized that having soaked the slices in water BEFORE soaking overnight in vinegar probably made the potatoes less absorbent, therefore less vinegar-y.  My plan for next time is to skip the water soak for a portion of the slices and go straight to an overnight vinegar soak. I'll let you know how it goes.