Oven Baked Chips

Chips, all hail the mighty chip.

Chips, oh what a love affair I have with them.
It started way before I was born. My mum is English, she was a chip connoisseur. There was not a thing that she could not tell you about chips. The best spuds or potato was Sebago so she used to say.
Now I come from potato growing region of New Zealand http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Cyc03Cycl-t1-body1-d7-d26.html

My mum used to work for the man in the photo (the link below) on his potato harvesters, Plus we grew our own.
We used to go behind dad on the tractor pulling the old potato harvester and pick the potatoes up in big cane baskets and then tip them into big Hessian sacks. Then dad would put them onto the back of the truck, back it was an old dodge truck. We used to grow enough to last us all year. We never ran out of potatoes. We used to store them in a big old red barn like shed.
The potatoes got that old that they would be sprouting through the Hessian sacks and mum would peel them with a knife because a peeler would just not cut through the sprouted bits.
She said they made the best chips.
http://www.odt.co.nz/regions/south-canterbury/138138/only-soil-world-producing-fish-and-chips

Potatoes

We never deep-fried them, they were cooked in a big enamel cast iron pan with sheep fat. Drenched in sheep fat. We would stay up late every weekend playing games with mum and dad and then for the super mum would cook chips for us. We had chips for breakfast with fried bread and eggs and sometimes chips for dinner.
We could not wait until Christmas because that was when the new potatoes would be ready to dig and dad always said that to have new spuds ready for Christmas, they had to be planted in August and I still follow that rule to this day.

Mum would always eat her chips with brown malt vinegar, we would either have vinegar or home-made tomato sauce or home-made plum sauce with them and most of the time in between 2 slices of bread and butter. I can still smell them.

So what is the best potato for chip making? Check out this handy guide: http://www.abc.net.au/tv/pohskitchen/stories/s2914278.htm

So fast forward years of me eating chips this way and the weight that has followed over the years. I had to find another way to cook them and still enjoy them. I find when I eat chips out of a deep fryer now I feel sick and tired from them. So this is what we have come up with. Both my husband and I find cooking them this way makes them easier to eat.
Now I cook on a wood stove, so my temperature fluctuates a bit. But you do need a good hot oven. 200 – 230 degree Celsius.
You can use no oil and just spray the rack if you wish. That way you make them totally oil free. But I like them with a little bit of oil. And it still gives a good result.
Hope you enjoy them as much as I do.

See full recipe (and save and print it ) here