Almost everyone struggles with their New Year’s resolutions, from eating healthier to exercising every day. It’s easy to understand the difficulty of bettering yourself due to the quick and easy nature of just picking up a bag of potato chips and calling it a day.
Potato chips are admittedly a staple in almost every household, but according to a Harvard study , they are one of the top offenders to your waistline getting bigger. Picking up a quick and easy, not to mention, delicious bag of chips is so tempting, but to those of you who continue to crave those crisp, starch-filled snacks, I have a solution. Fruit chips.
Compared to the salty, calorie-filled potato chips that most people love to dive into, fruit chips are a snack that you can eat with a less likely chance of you going on a hate-fueled run at the gym later. Depending on which fruit you choose, this delightful delicacy can bring you an array of necessary vitamins and minerals that your body will love.
With a recipe as quick and simple as this one, it’s a wonder why I hadn’t tried this earlier. You can use almost any fruit and transform it into a crisp chip, but I personally found apple chips to be one of my favorites. It doesn’t hurt that they’re actually one of the easiest fruits to prepare and cut as well. If you do decide to choose the common apple, I find that the tartier it is, the more delicious the chip. My go-to is usually the Pink Lady apple, but you can use any type!
To begin, washing your fruit is a must in order to scrub off any dirt or bacteria that may have been hitching a ride on it from the orchard or fields it came from. Once your fruit is properly washed, you have to thinly slice it. If it’s too thick, your chips will still come out delicious, but mushy! If you have a handy-dandy mandolin slicer, this step will be a lot easier, and somewhat safer than a knife, but either is fine. Spread the slices out into one layer on a baking sheet you’ve lined with a baking mat. If you don’t have a mat, then I’d suggest using parchment paper so you can save yourself about an hour of scrubbing mercilessly at your baking sheet.
At this point in the process, you can add your choice of sugar and spice to the sliced fruit to make it taste even better at the end, but it’s purely optional. For example, with apple chips, I like to add a quick mix of ground cinnamon and granulated sugar on top to give it that extra oomph.
Place your trays of sliced fruit in a preheated, 215 F-degree oven to bake for one hour. At the one-hour marker, take your fruit out of the oven and flip them over, then put them back in again for another hour and a half to two hours. This will allow your fruit on both sides to really crunch up! After this point, if you’re looking for a really crispy fruit chip, then I suggest turning the oven off and keeping the fruit inside for another hour as it cools down.
Finally, your fruit chips are ready to be munched on!
I know what you might be thinking, “Three hours to make some chips? Are you kidding me? How is this easier than buying a bag of Lays at the store?” Although this recipe does require several hours to complete, the time it’s actually going to steal is about 20 minutes, maybe 30, depending on your skill, while the rest is purely in baking time. During those long hours of baking, you could literally do anything else. Watch “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” paint your nails or even work on a procrastinated essay you just remembered to do as you put the fruit chip tray in the oven.
Maybe, you could even work on another New Year’s resolution you said you’d do.
Click here for the Harvard study: health.harvard.edu/blog/gaining-weight-beware-potatoes%E2%80%94baked-fried-or-in-chips-201106242943
