Today on Sugar Spun Run, I'll be showing you how to make homemade kettle chips.
Hey Sugar Spun Bakers, Sam here!
And today, I am so excited to be sharing another carefully tested,
well researched, and perfected recipe.
Today, we are making potato chips at home.
This recipe is surprisingly simple,
and what you need to get started is one pound of russet potatoes.
Now you do not need to peel your potatoes for today's recipe,
which is nice because it saves a little bit of work,
but you do want to wash them
and pat them dry and cut off any little eyes that are forming,
or little sprouts that are forming, before we begin.
Now we're going to need to cut these potatoes into really fine slices.
If you're really good with a knife, you can go ahead and do it with a knife.
You want them to be super thin—like think paper thin.
Now, you also want them to be very similar in width.
That way they cook evenly when we cook them in our oil.
Like I said, we could do this with a knife, but I highly,
highly, highly recommend you get yourself a mandolin.
This is going to make the work so much faster.
I use this thing all the time for making salads and just in my daily life anyway,
and it's about fifteen dollars on Amazon. I'll make I leave a
link for it in case you wanna grab yourself one if you don't already have one.
Now, I'm going to set this mandolin to the thinnest setting possible,
and I'm just going to cut my potato into really,
really thin sections. And I want you to take a look at this.
See, this is super thin. It's very difficult to get slices that are this thin
and this even if you do it with a knife.
So we'll go ahead and we'll slice all of our potatoes.
Of course, use your guard
once you get really low, that way you don't cut yourself
and any piece of potato that's just—you just can't get it thin enough,
you can just discard that end there. You don't wanna go so low that you end up cutting yourself.
All right, so once you have your potatoes nicely sliced,
we are going to want to submerge them in ice water for thirty minutes.
Now, you wanna soak your potatoes in ice
water because it helps draw the starches out and it's going to result in a crispier potato chip.
So we'll let those potatoes sit and they do need to sit for at least thirty minutes,
but you can certainly let them sit longer, that would be totally fine.
But while they're sitting, about fifteen minutes in,
I like to start preparing my frying station. Now the first thing
you're going to need is a large heavy-bottomed pot,
and I'm using my Dutch oven. And we're going to fill this about two inches deep with vegetable oil.
Now anytime you're frying, temperature is really important,
so you want to grab yourself a thermometer and we're just going to fit this to the side of our pot.
And I wanna make sure that the bottom of the thermometer is suspended in the oil
and it's not touching the bottom of the pot, which would give us a false reading obviously.
So I've got my thermometer in there. Now I'm going to turn my stove top to just below medium heat.
You wanna heat your oil nice and slow, and this is going to take some time.
Sometimes it takes twenty minutes or even longer for your oil to reach temperature.
So our oil's getting to temperature,
so now I like to set myself up a little station because frying can really be messy.
You can get grease all over your countertops. So to prevent this,
I grab myself a cookie sheet, and then I like to layer a piece of wax paper on top of that.
And then just a couple paper towels and this is going to catch any oil that soaks through.
It's just gonna, like I said, make it really easy to clean up.
And then I take a cooling rack, just set that there.
Now the last thing you need is a strainer. I like to use one of these spiders.
I love these things for frying, and you're gonna wanna have that at the ready.
We're going use this to lower our potatoes into the oil and to remove it from the oil.
All right, now your oil should be heating
and it should be heating to three hundred
and seventy five degrees, by the way if I didn't already say that,
so once it's getting close to that, I like to go back to my potato chips
and I'm just going to use a large strainer
and I'm—or a colander—and I'm going to drain off the potatoes in my sink. And then I'm gonna bring them back
and I'm gonna layer them over to my board here and I wanna get them nice and dry.
You're probably aware oil and water don't mix well together,
so you really wanna get these nice and as dry as possible.
I just layer them over some paper towels and then just try to blot them as dry as I can.
It doesn't have to be a hundred percent, but you do wanna get them pretty dry.
Okay, so about now my oil is at three hundred and seventy five degrees Fahrenheit.
So I am going to take a handful of potatoes and I'm going to put them in my spider here.
And I am just going to carefully lower them into the oil.
And as you can see, that was probably a little bit too many potatoes.
You wanna be very careful. Don't use that many potatoes all your first time
putting them in the pot because you run the risk of things over flowing.
The bubbling is normal, that's going to happen. That's some—that's partially happening
because of the water on the potatoes,
but maybe start with a little fewer potatoes than I did just there.
So the bubbling is going to die down.
And one thing I like to do is just periodically kind of stir the chips a little bit.
That way they don't stick together as they're cooking.
Now exactly how long it takes
for your potato chips to finish cooking properly really depends on a lot
of things, like many potatoes you add to the oil,
how much oil is in your pot, how larger pot is
—there are just many different factors. So, rather than give you an exact time,
I'd say it could take about three to five minutes for the potato chips to cook,
but rather than go exactly by a time or set a timer,
I want you to look for a few different things.
So you'll notice when your potatoes are done, they may be beginning to turn a light golden brown,
but also you may, as your stirring them with your strainer,
you should be able to hear them click together a little bit,
and they're also going to become stiff and like potato chips in the oil.
They may curl up a bit on the ends, and they're just going to hold their shape.
So these have been in the oil for about four and a half minutes right now,
so I'm going to very carefully lift them up with my strainer,
try to drain off as much oil as possible., tilt it a little bit because
you know they've got those crevices, I wanna get oil out of that
because hot oil is no joke.
And then I'm just going to transfer this to my station I set up earlier
and just kind of scatter them over the cooling rack.
Now, of course, our oil temperature has plummeted quite
a bit because we added all of those potatoes to it.
So, before we do our next batch, we want to let our oil get back to three hundred
and seventy five degrees.
Once it's at three seventy five, we'll go ahead
and add another handful—a smaller handful this time—of potatoes.
And we're going to cook these
as well. And then once these are done and they're looking like potato chips,
holding your shape like potato chips, and kind of clacking against each other in the pot,
we will carefully remove these to our cool—or our draining station as well.
All right, now the chips just need to cool down before you can enjoy them,
but, of course, you wanna add some flavor. The easiest thing you can add is sea salt.
I like to add freshly ground, flaky sea salt.
We'll just go ahead and scatter this over. And how much sea salt you need is really to taste,
so I recommend just sprinkling some on, trying a potato chip, and adding more if needed.
All right, and, as I said, these cool pretty quickly, so let's go ahead and take a look.
You can see they're nice and crisp. They snap for you.
These are perfect. I think you guys are really going to love this recipe.
And if you try it out, please let me know what you think.
As you know, I always love hearing from you. Well,
thank you guys so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.
These are good.