How to Easily Make Homemade Veggie Chips With A Mandoline Slicer

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Ready to make some homemade veggie chips with a mandoline slicer? While making your own chips may seem intimidating at first, once you learn the basics, you'll be off to the races.

I've seen a lot of veggie chips on the store shelves lately. So, of course, being me, I wanted to learn how to make them myself.

Being the minimalist that I am, when my family heard about a kitchen tool I was willing to make space for in the cupboards, they got us this mandoline slicer for Christmas.

I was looking specifically for a mandoline slicer that was mostly metal (I'm not a big fan of plastic), and that came with cut proof gloves (more on that below). This one fit the bill, and we love it!

Ever since we got it we've been making veggie chips several times each month.

Ingredients Used

• Root veggies (beets, sweet potatoes, parsnips, etc.)
• Avocado oil (this kind is naturally refined and non-GMO). You could also use olive oil.
• Salt - We love this salt because it's not stripped of the trace minerals like some salts.

Tools to Make veggie chips

• Mandoline slicer (make sure you get one with these extras)
• Baking sheet
• Parchment paper (these pre-cut sheets are big time savers)

Why Make Your Own Veggie Chips?

Okay, so you might be asking...Why would I make something myself if I can just buy it in the store? Good question.

1. Cost - A bag of veggie chips is marked up substantially. Considering it takes one sweet potato or beet to make a few sheets of chips, they're much less expensive when you make them at home.
2. Ingredients - The store bought chips are made using refined oils (like vegetable oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, etc.). We like to use more natural oils in our house, so making chips at home makes a lot of sense.

Related: How To Make Homemade Tortillas The Easy Way - With A Tortilla Press

What is a Mandoline Slicer?

A mandoline slicer is a tool (shown below) that has a sharp blade for cutting food to your desired thickness. Basically, you put something on the board, slide it down across the blade and it slices your food.

With this specific model (the one we have is pictured below), you can adjust the thickness to be paper thin or a bit thicker. I think ours goes up to 9mm thick, but I usually just eyeball it and try to make sure the slices are about the same size.

The top three reasons to get a mandoline slicer (or dig yours out from the back of the cupboard):

1. Uniform slicing (you can adjust how thick you want it, and have the option of julienne ("sticks") OR discs.
2. It will save you lots of time and money.
3. The model pictured above has foldable legs, which means easy storage!

Amazon has a great price right now, too!

Uniform Slicing with a mandoline slicer

Any time I've tried to slice something uniformly, I usually end up doing the opposite. They're usually close in size, but certainly not what I'd call "uniform".

When I'm ready to slice some food, I grab the mandoline slicer from the cupboard, unfold its legs, adjust the knob depending on how thick I want my slices, and then just slide the food across the blade. Each time a new slice is made. Nearly effortless.

You can even adjust it to do julienne slicing...which is something that took me FAR too long to realize. I think we had the mandoline for six months before I realized if you just keep turning the knob, it becomes a julienne slicer.

Save Time In The Kitchen

I'm all about saving time in the kitchen. I really do enjoy cooking, but I also enjoy spending time with my husband and kids, and being outside. So I try to be intentional with my time. When I'm in the kitchen I want to be as efficient as possible. Tools like the mandoline give me the efficiency I want.

Related: Top Time Saving Cooking Tools

Okay, back to the veggie chips. If I were to try and slice a sweet potato with a knife into "uniform" slices, it would take me at least five minutes and a lot of frustration because there's NO way I'll actually be able to do it in a "uniform" way. This was how I used to do it.

But now I have a mandoline. And since it takes less than a second to do each slice, I can get a whole sweet potato sliced in less than 1 minute with minimal effort. Talk about kitchen efficiency!

Side note: Given that the blade is so sharp, I'm really glad that our mandoline slicer came with cut proof gloves. I always wear one on the hand that's doing the slicing motion.

Uses for your Mandoline Slicer

Okay, so we've covered how awesome the mandoline slicer is (can you tell I'm a huge fan?). Let's talk about the different ways you can use it.

Your mandoline slicer can be used on a wide variety of foods. You can slice fruits, vegetables, meat, and cheese.

Our absolute favorite way to use it right now is these homemade veggie chips.

And when I say "our favorite", it's not just the grown ups. My daughters (5 and 3) LOVE veggie chips. It's pretty amazing that they won't eat beets, but they'll gobble down beet chips. I never thought I'd hear the day when my daughters would say, "More beet chips please!". But it happens. Every time I make them.

And they wouldn't touch parsnip fries, but they are loving the parsnip chips. I love it when vegetables aren't a battle!

Veggie Chip Recipe

To make veggie chips, slice your vegetable into thin slices with your mandoline slicer, or by hand. (We typically don't peel the veggies. But we buy organic and scrub them pretty good before slicing.)

Then toss them in a little oil and salt and place them in a single layer on a parchment lined cookie sheet. I recommend using olive oil or avocado oil, and staying away from vegetable oils as much as possible.

Baking The Veggie Chips

I started out making them as thin as I possibly could, but they were too easy to burn. So I've been making them a couple "clicks" thicker. I haven't measured, but something like ⅛" thick.

Bake at 350 (F) until the edges are curling up and starting to brown. The cooking time will vary based on the thickness and the type of vegetable you're using.

If you're slicing them SUPER thin, watch them closely at the 10-15 minute mark. Every oven is different and they can go from done to REALLY done in a few seconds. If some chips bake faster than the others, remove the ones that are done first.

If they're a little thicker, they'll cook in 20-30 minutes. And if they're really thick, they'll take even longer.

We've used this recipe using beets, sweet potatoes, and parsnips. I'm excited to try different seasonings next.

If you really want them paper thin, try cooking them in a 250(F) oven for a long time (one hour or more). We've only tried this once because I typically don't give myself enough time.

So What do you think?

Are you ready to make veggie chips at home? Hopefully you see the simplicity in the recipe and you'll taste the delicious flavor of home cooked, unprocessed food.

What other veggies have you made into chips? Let me know!

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