Root Veggie Chips & Mandolin Safety

Potatoes and sweet potatoes and beets oh my! I made regular potato chips once before and it went better than I expected. This time I was having a few people over for a game night (board games, yeah baby!) and figured, what better than some home made chips from assorted yummy root vegetables for snacks?!

Since frying the chips took me a while last time I decided to slice the veggies the night before so I could have more time the next day to do them early then air out the house. I bought some russet potatoes (which are a trillion times better fried than the red potato I previously tried) a big sweet potato and a bunch of beets. I washed and peeled all three and set to slicing them, bagging the slices as I went.

Ok boys and girls, a lesson here. Please don't think "oh I'll be careful so I don't need the safety holder specifically included with my mandolin". Let's just say an 'incident' occurred that made me very hesitant to touch my mandolin again. Don't worry I won't share pictures or get too graphic, and I didn't need to go to the hospital. Just please remember that while some veggies like cucumbers or peeled russets might be cake to slide through the mandolin, things like fibrous sweet potatoes and ESPECIALLY beets (cough cough) are much much harder to push through, requiring force that can cause you to hurt yourself. 

Now that we've gotten that mandolin life lesson out of the way, I did end up pressing on with frying the slices the next day. I hardly had any beets since I sliced myself while slicing them and that put quick end to it. Funny enough they turned out to be the least favorite. Maybe because I revealed my literal blood and tears went into them?? ;)

The darker the chip is the harder it was for me to tell when they were done. The potatoes were easy since they start out so white and are finished when they are golden brown (lighter than with red potatoes that needed to be a darker brown to be crispy). I used double the oil this time so I could do more chips at once. There was more spitting of the oil when adding the slices, but nothing extreme.

This is what I called done with the sweet potato. They were mostly crispy when they were the darkest color.

If they weren't so blood thirsty they might be prettier to me. Nah they really are a lovely color. The darker ones here with the almost burned edges are the ones that were really crispy. They sliced up thicker than the potatoes and seemed to be denser. I preferred these over the sweet potatoes but not as much as the regular potatoes.

The medley! Once these were all fried, drained and dried I put them in a bowl and sealed it with a plastic lid. When it was game time I served them with this ranch (my changes here). I'm really glad I tried all three of these root vegetables as chips, but probably the only one I'll make again will be the russets. But heck, make them yourself and find out which one YOU like! Just be careful, pretty please?

In honor of the blood and tears shed over these chips I'm introducing a new tag "Blood-Sweat-and-Tears (a.k.a MOTHER F*&%ER THAT SUCKED)" for when something makes me bleed, cry or just generally is the pit of pits. I hopefully won't be using this one a lot!