Homemade Ketchup Chips

Fried in tallow, these homemade ketchup chips made a delicious and wholesome snack for your family any time of the day.

Chips. Nothing satisfies a craving for crunchy, salty food quite like potato chips. Unfortunately the options for a healthy alternative at the grocery store are dismal. Most potato chips are fried in inflammatory seed oils. They use refined salts, have added sugars, and are full of artificial flavours. I don’t know about you, but that ingredient list does not sound tasty to me.

So, what is a person to do? We want the delicious, salty chips but we don’t want that ingredient list. Well friend, we make our own.

What the heck are ketchup chips?

Ketchup chips, if you aren’t familiar with them (are they just a Canadian thing?) are chips with a red, ketchup flavoured powder on them. They are a favourite with schooled aged children. They are sweet, salty and a little sour. And frankly, don’t really taste that much like ketchup.

In a fit of nostalgia, I decided that I wanted to recreate a childhood favourite so that my family could enjoy them more often than the occasional birthday party.

Ingredients for homemade ketchup chips

The list of ingredients for your own homemade ketchup chips is surprisingly short. You will need four things:

1. Potatoes
2. Tallow
3. A high quality, unrefined salt
4. Ketchup Power

Potatoes

Ideally, for making potato chips, you are going to want a flour-y, baking potato. Russet potatoes work extremely well. In reality, you can use whatever potato you happen to have. When I made these chips all I had was a waxy, yellow potato (it might have been a Yukon Gold). The chips were still delicious. Please don’t let something small, like a potato variety, stop you from making these homemade ketchup chips.

You are going to want to use a mandolin to slice your potatoes a few millimeters thick. For the love of everything, USE THE GUARD. Always use the guard that your mandolin came with. It is sharp and will slice off the tip of your finger if you slip.

If all you have is a knife, you can totally use that as well. It just might take you a little longer and your chips will have a lovely rustic homemade look about them. And there is nothing wrong with that.

Once you have all your potatoes sliced, you are going to soak them in a bowl of cold water to remove the starch. The water will turn cloudy and the potatoes change texture and get really firm. That is when you know they are ready to be fried.

Drain and rinse the potatoes. Then lay them out on a kitchen towel to dry off. You do not want to add wet potatoes to hot tallow. The fat will spit everywhere.

Tallow

Tallow is what sets this recipe apart from your bagged chips and makes it a truly wholesome option for your family. For those that don’t know, tallow is rendered beef fat. You are going to want to choose a tallow that is from healthy, grass-fed and finished beef. Grass-fed beef tallow is high in vitamin A and vitamin D. It contains linoleic acid which is considered a natural anti-inflammatory.

Tallow has a high smoke point, 420 F, making it an excellent option for frying and other high heat cooking.

You are going to want to fry these chips when the fat is about 350-375 F. That temperature will give you chips that get cooked and crispy without getting burned.

Quality salt

Unrefined salt is unprocessed salt extracted from natural sources. Unrefined salt contains all of its original trace minerals but doesn’t feature any additives or preservatives. Making it a tasty addition to all of your cooking, but especially to your homemade ketchup chips

The three types of unrefined salt include Himalayan salt, Real salt, and sea salt.

Ketchup powder

Ketchup powder is the key ingredient in these homemade ketchup chips. In order to make ketchup powder, I save all the skins and seed from my homemade ketchup and put them in the dehydrator until they are crispy and grind them up into a powder.

I used the Bernardin recipe to make homemade ketchup. It calls for cooking the tomatoes, including the skins and seeds, with all the ketchup ingredients and straining them out part way through cooking. What you are left with is tomato skins that have all the flavour of ketchup.

Seasons canners know that tomato skins ( a by-product of any tomato canning recipe) can be dehydrated and turned into a shelf stable powder. Tomato powder acts kind of like tomato paste in cooking and can help thicken a recipe and bump up that tomato flavour. So when I saw that I had ketchup flavoured tomato skins, turning them into powder was a no brainer for me.

How to make homemade ketchup chips

You are going to want to set a part a chunk of time for this project. It is not a hard recipe, but it does take time.

First you are going to thinly slice you potatoes and then soak them in a large bowl of cold water for at least 30 minutes. You want the water to get cloudy. That tells you the starches are coming of of the potatoes. The potatoes will also change texture. They get very firm.

Once you have reached this stage, rinse the potatoes in cold water and lay out on a kitchen towel to dry completely.

While you are rinsing and drying your potatoes, get a large, heavy bottom pot to melt your tallow in. I prefer to use an enamel, cast iron pot. You want it to be fairly large but not so large it is hard or unsafe to move. You will want the tallow to come about half way up the pot. When you add the potatoes, the oil will bubble and you want to make sure your pot is large enough that the tallow will not boil out of the pot.

Put the pot and tallow on the stove over a medium-high heat. You want it to reach at least 350F before you start to fry.

Next get your fry station set up. I like to get a baking sheet and put a couple of cooling racks on it to put the chips on once they come out of the tallow. You could also use paper towel on a sheet tray if you prefer. You need a frying spider to the the chips out of the hot tallow as well.

Lastly you need to get your seasoning ready. You are going to take about a 1/4 cup of ketchup powder and season it to your taste with salt. I like about a teaspoon of salt, but just taste your chip seasoning and adjust as needed.

After you are all set up, the frying goes pretty quick. Take you dried potato slices and gently add them to the tallow. You will want to lay the chips away from you so if they splash the hot tallow won’t spit onto you. Use the frying spider to move the chips around in the tallow.

Once the chips are deeply golden brown, lift them out of the pot and let some of the tallow drain. Place them on your sheet tray and sprinkle generously with the ketchup powder while they are hot. Repeat until all the potatoes have been fried. Then enjoy.

I hope that you will give these homemade ketchup chips a try. Do you and your family enjoy ketchup chips? Have you ever heard of ketchup chips? Let me know in the comments!