For Love of Chips

If I have one life goal, it is to make every vegetable into a chip of some kind.  I love salt.  I love crunch.  I love eating with my fingers.

I've tried my hand at baking kale chips (like every domestic diva on the planet) as well as collard chips, beet chips, and sweet potato chips.  Because I'm lazy, I've tried eating the pre-made kale chips sold in stores.  I find them revolting.  These homemade kale chips, however, are so popular at parties, they have garnered several marriage proposals (which were met with a conflicted blend of pride and jealousy by my husband).

You will find about ten million sets of instructions on the web about how to make these.  Mine are the best.  (These instructions work as well for collard chips.)  (Level:  chip novice)

• Buy some kale.
• Wash it.  Dry it.
• Tear it into chip-sized pieces (not too big--they will shrink as you bake them)
• Dump them in a big bowl and pour a bunch of olive oil over them.  
• Take the pieces out one by one and gently massage the oil on both sides of the leaf.  Do not be shy with the oil.  It's what makes the kale crispy and it is good for your skin, anyway.
• Lay the kale flat on a cookie sheet, no two pieces touching (kale Tetris!)  
• Sprinkle with salt.
• Bake at 325 for about 10 minutes.  This is the 'hard' part.  Check them obsessively.  There is about 10 seconds between 'done' and 'burned'.  If they are starting to turn brown, get them out right away.  They should be crispy and green, in a perfect world.  

I went through about a billion (okay, like, four) burned, limp, broken, over-salted and under-oiled batches before I 'perfected' the technique.  Don't get discouraged.  Practice makes perfect.  Once you get it right, you'll have your chance at polygamy, too.

As for other spices and flavors to 'enhance' the kale/collard chips, I have tried a few.  I always come back to plain old olive oil and salt.  It's just the best.

Root vegetable chips are a little trickier, but they are awesome.  I did sweet potato chips with my kindergarten class, and they told me they were "better than candy" (I almost cried with joy).

This is a beet chip:

For these and sweet potato chips, I use the following system:  (level: chip Jedi)

• Buy some beets (or sweet potatoes).
• Wash them and slice them with a mandoline slicer, at its thinnest setting (leave the skin on--that's how you get the ruffled edge)
• Bathe and massage the slices with olive oil.
• Lay the chips on a baking sheet (not touching) and sprinkle with salt.
• Bake at 325 for somewhere between 30 and 90 minutes.

See why it's tricky?  The baking time varies enormously depending on the whims of the gods or whatever.  You're not so much baking them as dehydrating them, and it needs to be a low temperature or the olive oil scorches and the chips burn.  You will probably want to flip them halfway through, and they will cook at varying speeds depending on the chip.  Remove them when they are mostly dry but still somewhat gummy.  Give them a few hours to dry out the rest of the way.  I lay them out on paper overnight, and in the morning, they are usually hard and crispy.  If not, I pop them in the oven again for a few minutes.  

Anyway, if you're an overachiever or want to hear a five-year old refer to a vitamin-rich vegetable as 'better than candy', it's worth it.  

All hail chips, and go make something.