Homemade Sweet Potato “Chips”

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Screen-Shot-2012-04-23-at-12.23.40-PM-300x237.png One of my favorite ways to get carbs in my diet is homemade sweet potato rounds, or “chips”. As I’ve said before, I need a good amount of carbs in my diet or I feel terrible. I do some sort of exercise 4 to 7 days a week, whether it’s walking, climbing, running, sprinting, riding a horse, or doing high intensity interval training. I know it’s possible to do that while on a high fat, very low carb diet, but I’ve tried and it hasn’t worked for me. So I eat carbs – anywhere from 75 to 130 grams a day of them. Thusly, sweet potatoes are an important part of my life, and I suggest to anyone who’s suffering from fatigue, carb cravings, or weakness on the Paleo diet that you add this little nugget of deliciousness into your life.

How Long Do They Take?

We make a big batch of these things about once a week, and it takes a couple of hours when all is said and done. That doesn’t mean you’re actually in the kitchen that whole time. It just means you’re checking on them in the oven every so often to make sure you don’t end up with sweet potato charred crisps instead of chips :)

You could also make these in smaller batches – maybe just one sweet potato as opposed to the three I used last night – and that would take less time. I just like to have them in the fridge so I can eat them cold or stick them in the toaster oven. Anyway, they’re delicious and satisfying and a great alternative to the sweet potato or potato chips you buy at the store, which are covered in seed oils.

Here’s what you need:

Sweet potato(es) – I use white sweet potatoes because they’re really sweet and light, but any will do
Baking sheet(s)
Sea salt (or not)

Oil (coconut, tallow, bacon drippings, lard, or ghee if you’re into that)

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Instructions

  1. Pre-heat your oven to 360 degrees F.
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  3. Slice the sweet potatoes into thin rounds, as consistently shaped as possible. The more consistent the thickness, the more consistently they’ll bake.
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  5. Place the rounds on baking sheets, using the space as efficiently as possible – they can be touching.
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  7. Sprinkle them with sea salt (or not) and add any other seasonings you like (pepper, rosemary, cayenne).
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  9. (This step is optional, too.) Drizzle a couple drips of oil onto each round. I melted some coconut oil in a pan and dripped it on with a spoon. OR you can just shave off some tallow or solidified coconut oil and sprinkle it over the rounds. There’s no right or wrong to this process, and they’ll turn out delicious regardless of how much oil you put on them. They’ll look like this before they go in the oven…
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  11. Bake on 360 F for 15 minutes until they look like this.

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  13. Then take those thin, brown, crispy ones out and put them on a plate – they’re done. Flip the rest of them over and put them back in the oven for about 10 minutes. The remaining bake time really depends on how thin the rounds are sliced. The thinner they are, the less cook time they’ll need, and that’s why you have to constantly check on them. The end goal is light brown, crispy edges. Don’t let them go until they’re completely brown or they’ll be burned.

 
That’s it!

They shrink down considerably, and I usually can’t resist eating them while they’re coming out of the oven, so make more than you think you’ll need. I store them in the fridge for up to a week and eat them with my famous guacamole (the recipe to which I will someday nail down and post here), or as part of a meat and veggie dish, or just on their own. Eat them cold or heat them up in a toaster oven.

Nutritional Value

This is for about 10-15 sweet potato chips with the oil. This info was derived from www.myfitnesspal.com.

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Enjoy! And please let me know how they work out for you if you try them.