Home-made crisps are one of the more satisfying uses for a slicer and one of the easiest to get wrong. The failures are consistent: soft in the middle, burnt at the edges, or leathery throughout. All three trace back to the same few variables.

Thickness Is Everything

Crisps need to be very thin and, more importantly, all the same thickness. Around one to one and a half millimetres is the target.

Variation is fatal here in a way it is not in most cooking. A slice half a millimetre thicker than its neighbours will still be soft when they are done; one thinner will be black. This is the preparation that most clearly demonstrates why a fixed adjustable bed matters, and ranges built around continuously variable thickness, such as benriner mandoline models, make the setting reproducible across a whole batch.

Removing Starch and Moisture

Potatoes and other starchy roots need rinsing. Surface starch causes slices to stick together and browns unevenly, producing dark patches before the centre has dried.

Rinse in cold water until it runs clear, then dry thoroughly. Thoroughly means between clean tea towels or on kitchen paper, patted rather than left to drip. Residual water steams rather than crisps and is the most common single cause of soggy results.

Which Vegetables Work

• Potato, the standard, and the most forgiving
• Sweet potato, which burns more easily due to sugar content
• Beetroot, excellent but stains everything
• Parsnip, sweet and prone to burning at the edges
• Carrot, which needs to be very thin to crisp at all
• Celeriac and swede, both underused and very good

Oven, Air Fryer or Fried

Deep frying gives the best result and the most mess. Around one hundred and sixty to one hundred and eighty degrees, in small batches, until the bubbling subsides.

An air fryer works well and is considerably less trouble, provided the basket is not crowded. A single layer is essential; overlapping slices steam each other.

The oven works but needs attention. A low temperature around one hundred and forty degrees for a long period dries them rather than browning them quickly, and slices need turning and rotating.

Oil and Seasoning

Toss the dried slices in a very small quantity of oil, a teaspoon for a whole tray, rather than drizzling. Even coating matters more than quantity.

Season after cooking, not before. Salt draws out moisture, which is exactly what you have spent effort removing, and salt applied before cooking also burns.

Storage

Home-made crisps have no preservatives and soften within hours in humid air. They are at their best within a few hours of cooking.

An airtight container extends that to a day or two. Reviving softened crisps in a hot air fryer for a minute or two works surprisingly well.

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