If you slice the potatoes too thickly, they won’t crisp up. You want them to be roughly 1/16th” thick, which is hard to achieve using a knife alone.
Be sure to hold the potato at an angle when slicing the potato, to make the slices as large as possible. The potato slices will shrink significantly as they cook, so the larger slices will mean you’re not left with teeny-tiny baked sweet potato chips. Have a sweet potato that is wider than your mandoline slicer? Simply slice the side off until it fits, so you can easily slide the potato back and forth over the blade.
Safety Tip: As your sweet potato gets smaller and smaller when using the mandoline slicer, be sure to use the finger guard that the slicer comes with, to protect your hands. It’s very easy to slice your fingers on the sharp blade! (It happened to me once, and I’ll never let it happen again.) When baking sweet potato chips, you can skip the oil all together, but the mouth feel won’t be the same as store-bought potato chips. In fact, oil-free potato chips are pretty dry and unappealing in texture.
Instead, I recommend brushing each potato slice lightly with olive oil (on both sides) so that they bake evenly, with a melt-in-your-mouth crispness. You don’t want to use so much oil that they are dripping, but you want to use enough that they have a shine to them with they go into the oven. If you try baking sweet potato chips at 350ºF or 400ºF, they tend to get too brown before they get that melt-in-your-mouth crispiness that we come to expect when eating a chip. Setting your oven slightly lower and cooking them a little longer gets that perfect crispy texture, without waiting too long for your homemade sweet potato chips.
You’ll probably notice that smaller chip slices will cook faster than the larger ones. After roughly 25 minutes of baking is usually when I need to remove the smaller pieces, and then the larger slices will need 30 to 35 minutes of baking total. If you find that your chips aren’t nearly done after 35 to 40 minutes of baking, that probably means they were sliced too thick. You can continue to bake them until they crisp up more, but they may never be quite as crunchy as a store-bought chip when they are thicker.
How to Serve Them
What do you eat with sweet potato chips? These homemade chips are a little more earthy-tasting than the deep-fried kind you’d buy at the store, so I think they go best with a dip, like homemade guacamole or vegan ranch dressing. They also make a great side dish for my favorite veggie burgers.
If you try these Baked Sweet Potato Chips, please leave a comment below and let me know how you like them! And if you make any modifications, I’d love to hear about those, too. We can all benefit from your experience. — Reader Feedback: What kind of snacks do you crave?
