Apple Chips - The Simplest Snack

I bought this bag of organic apples the other week, and was all excited to get home and eat one. Back when we lived in a DC suburb, we had access to AMAZING produce via the Silver Spring Farmer's Market. The Gettysburg area is a great region for agriculture, which I did not know before moving DC. Virginia is also a great place to farm (which I did know), which meant that being in the middle of those two places was about as good as life got in terms of a locavore culture. We would regularly come home with bags full of apples the size of my hand.

The problem with apples, though, is that I'm allergic to them. Not deathly allergic to them, but my mouth gets terribly itchy and I spend the next hour or so uncomfortable until my saliva has done its job and washed all the apple pollen out of my mouth. And I somehow always forget this and then buy apples and they don't get eaten. However! I have learned that if I cook the apples before eating them I don't get itchy mouth! Magic.

In our quest to Get Healthy, as I mentioned, we're trying to go healthy in our snack choices. So the other day I came home with a little pouch of Bare Fruit organic apple chips from Target. They were something like $2.99 or $3.99 for a bag of just over 2.5oz. We opened up the bag and were like "Hey! 2.5oz does not a lot of apple chips make!" At this point I remembered those forlorn apples sitting in our refrigerator and decided that it could not possibly be over $1 an ounce worth of difficult to make apple chips.

Once again, this turned out to be ridiculously simple. It can be as simple as one ingredient. I went with three ingredients, but you could make these in a lot of different ways.

Preheat your oven to 225. This is probably the lowest temperature on your oven dial.

If you have a mandoline, great, break it out. If you don't, like I don't, just get a serrated knife and cut yourself nice thin slices of apple. Cut straight through the middle of the apple so you get the pretty star shape. Pop out the seeds into the trash and discard the end pieces.

I did two apples, skins on, and filled a 16x14 cookie sheet with a couple of oddball slices left over. My slices varied in thickness, and most of them weren't perfectly round. That's ok. Your mouth will not know the difference. Conveniently, varied sizes of apple slices also give you varied crunchiness, which adds to the fun.

I sprinkled mine with cinnamon and sugar. Those are the other two ingredients. Some people like just plain ol' apple chips. Some people like cinnamon & sugar or ginger or allspice or whatever. Do your thing. Then put the apple slices into your preheated oven.

Check them every 30 minutes and flip them over. Reading around online, everyone suggested putting them on parchment paper or on a baking rack. Who do I look like, flipping Tyler Florence? I don't own either of those things. I have T-Fal AirBake pans from Target. And I will swear to you that I didn't treat my pan in any way and I had absolutely no sticking issues whatsoever. I suppose the key to this trick is having a light colored pan and being very good about flipping them. But no special equipment was required in the making of these apple chips.

Mine ended up taking about 1 hour and 15-20 minutes to bake. The very thin, small chips came out after about an hour. The thicker ones probably could've stood another 10 minutes-or-so in the oven, but they smelled heavenly and we couldn't wait to eat them.

I would love to tell you if they get any crisper after they've cooled for a while, but I have no idea, because we ate the entire batch that evening. So basically each of us had an apple onto which we'd sprinkled less than a combined 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon & sugar.

Dig in.