BLT with cheese and potato chips on homemade bread

Lettuce

Cheese

BLTCPC 

Bacon lettuce tomato cheese potato chip sandwich, how does it fit in your mouth? 

By smashing it. 

Potato chips

Chips off the old block. Of potato. And they sure are chippy. These are perhaps the chippiest potatoes I've ever made, or even eaten entirely, or just chipped away at a pile of like this. And the whole time I was thinking maybe I should chip in to show the advantages of a single small potato, when the chips are down instead of simply allowing the chips to fall where they may, so that we might all be in the chips and not beggars to stingy vending machine handouts, standing there with chips on our shoulders because our bag screwed forward but failed to fall, while the vending machine people are rolling in the chips.

Potato chips

You buy potato chips, you don't make them, so then here's how to make potato chips.

The water is showing the surface starched sloughed. The water contains vinegar to toughen the cells allowing for longer cooking at lower heat to assure a crisp texture before turning dark brown. 

The salt must be fine. This is kosher salt spun through spice grinder, a coffee mill, to reduce the salt flakes to dust. 

Ice cream, potato chips

Why do you say it is a study in contrasts when it is monochrome? 

Salty X sweet

warm X freezing

crispy X creamy
lightweight X dense

vegetable X animal

stable X melting
irritate a paper cut or torn cuticle X brain freeze

The thing is you cannot see the caramel sauce flavored with cinnamon and instant espresso nor the banana cut into discs and piled up on the sides, nor the rest of the potato crisps carelessly strewn about beyond the plate, because I didn't feel like showing it.

What? Hang on. I sense a minor distant disruption in The Force. FINE ! Here then, have the thing like it was with caramel and banana.

Potato chips, crisps

I used one large russet potato. The potato is a starchy type.

Potato cut into a bowl of cold water. The water immediately turns cloudy which shows the surface starch on the slices is being removed. The slices will stick together and to your tools if you skip this step. That tells you not to use water if you're making a dish where you want the slices to stick. Sometimes starchy glue is good, here it's not. The potato was cut on a Japanese slicer which is the plastic version of a mandolin. It's a razor sharp tool and a bargain at a fraction of the cost. <-- See what I did there? You can see the thinness of the slices by the blue lines of the towel showing through. It's possible to get the potatoes too thin. A few test swipes will show the desired adjustment. Dried with another layer of kitchen towel, cooked in batches.

Cooked in that vegetable oil/lard combination used earlier for french fries at 325˚F / 160˚C until the bubbles stop. At that lower temperature the bubbles stop just before they turn golden. They float. You can see them turn crisp by turning them. They change to golden brown a few seconds after the bubbles stop. This gives you about one minute margin for error between not done enough to overly browned.

Salt straight out of the oil while vulnerable. If you wait too long, the salt bounces off. Presently I have only kosher salt which is flaky. I put a tablespoon of kosher salt into the coffee grinder to reduce the size of the crystal.

These are the best potato chips I've ever had. I do believe I have mastered the technique for potato chips, crisps if you prefer.

1) slice potato thinly into water then dry

2) cook in vegetable oil/lard combination.

Potato chips

This was dinner -- a potato.

* Potato sliced and soaked to rid the slices of excess surface starch
* Slices dried
* Slices chilled in freezer uncovered to desiccate
* Fried at 325℉
* Salted while still vulnerable