Sometime ago, I got a mandoline — the slicing gadget, not the musical instrument. With a sharp blade set against a depth guide, you can quickly slice things to a consistent width. That includes fingers, so I make good use of the gripper tool that comes with it and also a pair of cut resistant gloves!

My reason for wanting one was to make potato crisps using my deep fryer and, although it has been pressed into service for plenty of other projects, today was the first time I actually tried this project. The results were fantastic!

One medium potato yielded a good portion for two people. I sliced it on the thinnest setting, dropped the slices in salted water and then set them on racks to dry off. That could have been done a few hours earlier but a little bit of water doesn’t matter in the context of a fryer that is deep enough not to have any danger of bubbling over. I put the basket in first and dropped in the slices, batch by batch, so that they have formed a skin before they hit the wire, preventing them sticking.

At the point they were just beginning to colour, I shook off the excess fat and turned them out onto kitchen towel on a plate before collecting in a bowl. Once all the slices were done, I briefly refried them (larger batches) to deep the colour and, once back in the bowl again, seasoned with salt, black pepper and some sumac powder.

The process is quite labour intensive and requires a certain energy investment. They also probably won’t keep very long. However, it saves all the embodied energy of the production and transport of a packet of factory-produced crisps and doesn’t require the hard-to-recycle packaging so I will certainly be making more potato crisps in the future.