Hard crisp

I remember being unimpressed first time I opened a bag of imported root vegetable chips. Fried cassava, sweet potato, yam, taro — these were standard offerings at fairs everywhere in this country, and for a fraction of the price.

These chips are touted as healthier than the more heavily processed corn and potato chips, but let’s face it: they are not as… satisfying, shall we say. Vegetables, like everything else, are subject to the vagaries of the natural world, including the weather, environment, and the simple fact that, once harvested, they promptly start to degrade. It is why a manufacturer like URC relies heavily on natural and artificial flavorings — both created in a lab, the difference being that the former has been isolated from a natural source while the latter is synthetic or man-made — to ensure every bag of, say, Jack ’n Jill V-Cut potato chips tastes the same regardless of the quality of the base ingredient.

And then there is the matter of what Howard Moskowitz calls the “hook” — the singular sensory attribute that you associate something with, which sounds good, but in this case works against a product by dominating the experience thereof, making consumers quickly tire of it. With kamote and company, I posit that hook to be their unique way of being crispy.

Oh, everyone wants crispy chips, all right. That was why, when someone mentioned that the potato chips at Cafe Emanuel were “good, but rather expensive,” we just had to try it. They were good, true, if on the burnt side. And wickedly pricey for so few. Small wonder Ghia flinched when she saw our tab (she was paying). “You can do better,” she had said to me later. And I did. With more, from a single potato.

But I digress, as usual. There is a marked difference between the crispiness of potato (thin, delicate) and sweet potato (and, relatively, of yam and taro; hard, rigid, brittle). Sooner or later with the latter, your jaw signals your brain that it has had enough work (or so I imagine). That is a good thing, too, because you do not eat too much of it.

Besides, making potato chips is a bit more involved. First you slice, rinse, steep in salted water for at least half an hour, dry with paper towels, and only then can you fry. With the others, it is straight to the frying pan after slicing/seasoning with salt (and pepper, if you prefer, as I do). Make sure the slices are uniform (I used a mandoline), and the oil hot enough (at least 350°F). Remove from the pan shortly after the bubbling stops — the slices may still look pale but they will darken once out of the oil (waiting for them to brown there will give you burnt chips, as with Cafe Emanuel’s). Store in heated oven at the lowest setting as the rest cook.

This batch had sweet potato, purple yam, and beetroot. Of the three, beet shrunk the most — dramatically so — and succumbed to the humidity long before the others. But it tasted the best, with a pronounced sweetness and a crispiness not unlike potato’s. With an uncanny resemblance to bacon, beet chips should make an interesting topping for vegetable salad, French toast, or baked potato. Ghia prefers them — anything, really — with beer.