Homemade Potato Chips Recipe on Food52 (2024)

FAQs

What is the best oil for homemade potato chips? ›

On oil, sunflower and sunseed are very efficient, and many people swear by using groundnut oil. But, if you're after flavour, cooking chips in beef tallow (rendered beef fat you can get from your butcher) gives you better flavour and colour – the choice is yours.

To have the best chances for crisping, soak your cut chips for 30 minutes in a bowl of slightly salted water to remove some of the starch. Once soaked, dry them off properly with a paper towel as any moisture will create steam which will inhibit crisping.

The difference lies in their starch content and structure. Waxy potatoes are amazing for boiling as they keep their shape, but floury potatoes fry up crisper. Use a floury (also called mealy) potato such as Russet or Shepody for your chips and you'll have better success.

How Do You Keep Homemade Chips Crispy? The key to keeping homemade potato chips crisp is to store them in an airtight container, which protects your chips from outside moisture. Just make sure the chips have thoroughly cooled off for at least 30 minutes at room temperature before sealing them.

Making your own potato chips not only allows you to control the ingredients and flavors, but also significantly reduces costs. To get the biggest bang for your buck, you need cost-effective fully automatic potato chips line.

Peanut Oil:

This is important because you want the heat to be high enough to cook the chips quickly and make them crispy and a light, delicate texture, making it a popular choice among professional chefs. Research has shown that our SuperCrunch Thick Cut and Peanut Oil are a match made in heaven.

Potatoes, Vegetable Oil (Canola, Corn, Soybean, and/or Sunflower Oil), and Salt.

First let's talk about why cut potatoes need to be immersed in water to begin with. The reason is to prevent the potatoes exposure to air, which causes dehydration, oxidation, and discoloration. Immersing cut potatoes will also help rinse off excess starch.

The choice is yours: Scrub the potatoes clean or peel them thoroughly. Leaving the skin on adds color and a faint bit of texture to the final chip. It all depends on how classic or rustic you like.

Cut each slice into fairly thick chips and rinse in a colander under plenty of cold water to remove excess starch. (If you have time, it's worth letting the chips soak in a bowl of cold water for several hours, or overnight.) Pat dry with kitchen paper.

What is the secret to crispy chips? ›

The Double-Fry Method

When it comes to the actual cooking, you want to fry the french fries twice. The first round is at a lower temperature to cook the inside of the potato and the second time you'll use a higher temperature to make the fries golden brown and crispy.

Spread a layer of store-bought kettle cooked potato chips on a baking sheet and sprinkle with finely grated Parmesan cheese (Pecorino also works well). Grind some black pepper on top, then do another layer. Think of it like making nachos: you want every chip to get at least a little bit of action from the toppings.

Peel the potatoes and cut into 1cm-thick chips. Parboil the chips in boiling salted water for 8 to 10 minutes, or until soft but keeping their shape. Drain in a colander and leave to steam until completely dry – this is very important before frying.

Frying Oil: A high-temperature oil is necessary for making homemade potato chips so that the oil can get hot enough without smoking. Peanut oil, sunflower oil, vegetable oil, and canola oil are a few options that will work great.

For chips, we recommend using a maincrop floury potato, like a Maris Piper, which will give you a fluffy inside and crisp outer coating. They will absorb the oil when fried to give you the crunchy chip you're looking for.

Why are my homemade chips not crispy? It's likely that too many chips were cooked at once (a crowded pan is never a good thing) and doing so means the temperature of the oil decreases, resulting in soggy, greasy chips.

It takes four pounds of potatoes to make a single one-pound bag of potato chips, and each year, Golden Flake turns 100 million pounds of potatoes into chips. Every day, the plant uses 12,000 gallons of vegetable oil, and every minute, it uses 350 gallons of water in the snack-making process.

They are sliced thinly and fried & salted. A large bag (1 pound) might have 10 to 12 medium potatoes, a snack bag (1 oz) would probably have come from a single potato. The frying process replaces the water weight with some oil, so the weight of the potatoes was about 4 times the weight of the bag of chips. Cheers!

Once opened, Lay's potato chips will keep for at least 1-2 weeks before getting stale. Homemade potato chips can be kept in a sealed container for about the same length of time.

Refined peanut oil is the best oil to use for making french fries. You can also use canola or safflower oil. Additionally, restaurant fries are so crispy because, among other things, they use old oil continuously.

Is it better to fry chips in oil or lard? ›

For instance, sunflower and sunseed oils are efficient and considered as the 'healthier' options as they have higher levels of polyunsaturated fats. However, if flavour is your game then go for cooking your chips in lard or rendered beef fat (which you can get from your local butcher).

The best cooking oil for chips is sunflower oil, as it is high in polyunsaturated fats, has a relatively high smoke point and leaves chips crispy - it's particularly suitable for air frying.

Frying in Vegetable Oil vs Olive Oil

Vegetable oil, especially sustainable palm oil, is the best oil for frying and deep frying. Because it has a very high smoke point, these healthy nutrients won't break down as quickly during the frying process – unlike olive oil.