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wombat1138About to head out on vacation for a week or so, requiring a purge of perishable food. One item was an entire package of lavash flatbreads from Trader Joe's that had been sitting around for several days but hadn't even opened yet. By experience, TJ's preservative-free baked goods are fiendishly vulnerable to molding within a very short time; these were still okay, but there wasn't much chance I'd eat them all before we leave. So I made them into snack chips.
The usual recipe for homemade baked/recycled chips involves bagels, pita bread, or tortillas. Following that method, I stacked up the lavash, cut them into ~1" squares, put them into a big bowl with maybe 1/3 cup of ranch dip (made from low-fat sour cream + prefab mix), and mooshed everything around by hand until the dip seemed to be evenly distributed and the squares felt more or less uniformly damp/moist, but not soggy.
Normally the bagel/etc. chips are simply tossed with olive/veggie oil and single-layered straight onto a baking sheet, but I wanted to maximize airflow around the chips in order to dry out the sour cream. Laid out two cookie (or jelly-roll) sheets, put a small wire rack within the sides of each one, and distributed squares in a thin layer over the top of the rack, vaguely separating them as they were laid down. (Large stuck-together chunks were broken apart, but I left plenty of squares overlapping with several others.) There was enough room between the rack and the top of the sheets' walls that I balanced a larger wire rack on top of each sheet and spread another layer up there.
Both sheets went into a 350F oven and were checked at ~10-minute increments; each time, the really crispy ones were shunted off into temporary storage and the rest were slightly redistributed (switching between upper/lower oven shelves, spreading out the remaining damp squares farther apart, etc.) Total time was maybe 30-40 minutes, and probably would've been much faster with an oil coat than a wet sour cream base.
Still, aside from putting the lavash to good use, one of the main points of the exercise was to check if this *could* be done with sour cream. Answer: yes; it just takes longer.
(If tossed with oil, the chips might benefit from a dash of seasoning-- herbs or maybe cinnamon (sugar? Not sure if the chips would crisp up before the sugar burned to bitter black tar; will have to try that sometime) or grated cheese (ditto).
The usual recipe for homemade baked/recycled chips involves bagels, pita bread, or tortillas. Following that method, I stacked up the lavash, cut them into ~1" squares, put them into a big bowl with maybe 1/3 cup of ranch dip (made from low-fat sour cream + prefab mix), and mooshed everything around by hand until the dip seemed to be evenly distributed and the squares felt more or less uniformly damp/moist, but not soggy.
Normally the bagel/etc. chips are simply tossed with olive/veggie oil and single-layered straight onto a baking sheet, but I wanted to maximize airflow around the chips in order to dry out the sour cream. Laid out two cookie (or jelly-roll) sheets, put a small wire rack within the sides of each one, and distributed squares in a thin layer over the top of the rack, vaguely separating them as they were laid down. (Large stuck-together chunks were broken apart, but I left plenty of squares overlapping with several others.) There was enough room between the rack and the top of the sheets' walls that I balanced a larger wire rack on top of each sheet and spread another layer up there.
Both sheets went into a 350F oven and were checked at ~10-minute increments; each time, the really crispy ones were shunted off into temporary storage and the rest were slightly redistributed (switching between upper/lower oven shelves, spreading out the remaining damp squares farther apart, etc.) Total time was maybe 30-40 minutes, and probably would've been much faster with an oil coat than a wet sour cream base.
Still, aside from putting the lavash to good use, one of the main points of the exercise was to check if this *could* be done with sour cream. Answer: yes; it just takes longer.
(If tossed with oil, the chips might benefit from a dash of seasoning-- herbs or maybe cinnamon (sugar? Not sure if the chips would crisp up before the sugar burned to bitter black tar; will have to try that sometime) or grated cheese (ditto).
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no subject
on 2007-05-03 07:46 pm (UTC)