Homemade BBQ Chips

So I embarked upon a homemade potato chip adventure tonight. The kids are in agreement.. Best idea ever!! I discovered a few things in the process.. had a lot of fun.. and didn't maim myself until I was washing dishes, proving my point that dishes are hazardous to my health.

So anyway, back to the chips.. I sliced several potatoes on my mandolin slicers thinnest setting. I was a smart girl.. I used the hand guard. Managed all the potatoes without maiming a finger. Woot! I put the mandolin over a bowl of water and sliced the potatoes directly into the water. I arinsed them a couple times.. then soaked them in a bowl full of water with a heavy pinch of salt added for about 25 minutes. During that time I chopped and fried up some bacon.. Yeah, I said bacon. We'll get to that later.. ;) After soaking, I rinsed the potatoes off and then laid them out on tea towels to dry.

In my big enameled cast iron dutch oven I heated up about 2 qts of oil to 365 degrees. When it came up to temp I used my big spider to drop a batch of potatoes into the hot oil, stirred them around.. and when they looked like this:

I let them cook for just 1 minute longer (really just so I could post the picture to facebook before fishing them out hahaha) then I fished them out with my big spider spoon thingy (you can kinda see there off to the right in the pic) and dropped them into a big metal bowl..

Now comes the fun part... I felt like Gina Neely from food network, playin' spice fairy to my chips! I had some rub left over from the beef ribs I did this weekend for Sunday Lake Day. One of my best rubs ever, actually.. Used white sugar, brown sugar, lawrey's salt, onion powder garlic pepper, white pepper, and a ton of paprika.. It was yummy.. So I sprinkled my chips with it right as they came out of the oil and tossed them around the bowl to coat them as I sprinkled..

They were SO freaking good!! Kids flipped out. I kick Lay's ass. For real.. who knew making BBQ style potato chips just required a standard rub. LOL I kept them on a paper towel lined cookie sheet in a 200 degree oven to keep them hot while I cooked all the chips..it took several batches.. especially since we kept eating them while the next batch was cooking.. putting them in the oven and keeping a small bowl out to munch on was the only way any of them actually made it to the table. LOL

They were amazing.. but I wasn't done there. Oh no. Noooooo. What I did next was naughty naughty. I drizzled some bbq sauce (bullseye memphis is what I used cuz I wanted that molassesy sweetness) all over the chips. Then I put several handfulls of shredded cheese (cheddar and colby jack) all over them, like nachos! Remember the cooked chopped bacon from earlier?? Oh yeah baby.. I sprinkled it all over my chips.. Then threw it under the broiler till the cheese was bubbly and melty and brown in some spots.. Then I tossed some chopped green onions (both the whites and the green tops) all over it, gave it one more little drizzle of BBQ sauce and gave it some pickled jalapeno slices.. And this little masterpiece is what my daughters have deemed "Pumped Up Chips!!".

Aren't they so pretty?

P.S. I totally ripped off this idea from Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives. :D But man oh man.. this was freakin gooooooood!!!

P.S.S. The rinsing and soaking process that I used here results in a very light crispy chip.. much like a lays original potato chip. I like a little more crunch to my chips.. So I decided to try slicing up a potato and dropping it right into the oil without rinsing or soaking it, for one of the batches... I liked those chips a lot more, they seemed have a bit more crunch.. but I'd like even more crunch.. like kettle cooked chips... so I am going to look into making kettle style chips at home.