Update on our tallow chips

Thank you for your support and your interest in our beef tallow fried potato chips. Unfortunately it isn’t feasible to make them anymore. If you want potato chips fried in beef tallow, you can check Beefy’s Own or Rosie’s Chips (both are unaffiliated with us).

Why aren’t we making tallow chips anymore?

• I wasn’t able to make them cheaply enough to offer them for a reasonable price. Because of regulations due to the use of tallow, and because of the very small size of our operation, I had to add extra steps to the chip making process which made them way too expensive to produce without charging you a ridiculous price, which I will not do. We charged $6.80 for a 5 oz bag of chips (which is already really expensive) and ended up not profiting. We would have had to charge a lot more to make enough profit. Such a high price for a snack is absurd and you’re much better off paying less to make your own chips at home or buying a cheaper brand.
• I found that I disliked the taste, texture, and digestibility of our chips after a while. Tallow made the chips taste like an old leather belt, and I couldn’t honestly advertise the chips as being good. Instead of tallow, someone ought to try frying chips in clarified butter, refined coconut oil, or a blend of the two in order to make really good tasting, seed oil free, low aldehyde chips (aldehydes are why you don’t want to deep fry with seed oils – more info here). I think the butter idea is promising. (I think it has to be clarified butter, as normal butter apparently will burn at deep frying temperatures.)
• I also discovered that making chips on a large scale is not pleasant or healthy work (due to breathing cooking oil fumes all day, and using sanitizer chemicals), and I wasn’t comfortable with hiring employees to do that. I didn’t like doing it myself either!
• Homemade food is generally better than manufactured food, even if the manufacturer uses good ingredients. Like all commercial food manufacturers with regulations to follow, we had to use sanitizer chemicals all over the place – these probably get into the food and can’t possibly be good for you. This is a problem with all commercial food, and it may be a big reason why commercial food seems to be more unhealthy than homemade food.

So we aren’t making chips anymore. Instead, we would like to help you make your own seed oil free potato chips at home.

Making your own potato chips

In theory it’s very simple to make potato chips – you heat a pot of frying oil up to the low-mid 300’s deg F, put potato slices into it until they stop bubbling, then you take them out and salt them and you’re done!

Except if you do that, it won’t quite work. There’s a few more key points to make potato chips at home.

1) The chips will burn if you don’t use special “chipping potatoes.” Big snack companies use special potato varieties bred for deep frying chips. If you don’t use “chipping potatoes,” the chips will turn brown and bitter tasting. We struggled a lot with this since we had to use russet potatoes, which are not chipping potatoes. We were able to partly reduce burning by blanching the potato slices in hot water first, but it wasn’t enough and it damaged the flavor of the chips too. The only way to really prevent bad-tasting burning is to use those specialty chipping potatoes. Unfortunately chipping potatoes aren’t available on the retail market, despite being essential for making potato chips without burning.

However we have just now finally managed to get a source of organic chipping potatoes, and we are considering selling them, if there’s enough interest. If you are interested, please contact us. (Restaurants especially could use this!)

2) Use a good frying oil: tallow, refined coconut oil, or possibly clarified butter. Seed oil breaks down into harmful aldehydes when it is deep fried, and these aldehydes absorb into the potato chips. That’s the reason we don’t like frying in seed oils. But the good frying oils don’t produce so much aldehyde the first time you deep fry them.

However, did you know that a good frying oil like tallow will also produce just as much aldehydes when the tallow gets reused for frying over and over again? (restaurants reuse their frying oil many times, for weeks) Deep fry with your tallow 1-3 times and then discard it. It’s very hard for a commercial operation to not reuse their frying oil, which is why it’s usually better to make chips yourself at home. Fresh frying oil at home means way less aldehydes!

3) Get something to slice the potatoes! You really need thin uniform slices. Can’t be done with a knife. Get a mandoline! Although we used a tabletop electric machine which we liked a lot, it only cost a few hundred dollars and was very worth it.

4) Use powdered salt, also called popcorn salt. The salt grains are very small so they stick to the chips in a way that larger salt doesn’t.

Conclusion

We thank you for supporting our tallow chips. Unfortunately it didn’t work because of high costs, but we still believe in the importance of avoiding seed oil in potato chips. For that reason, I hope you find this article on making your own seed oil free chips useful. And if you are interested in buying chipping potatoes (so that your homemade chips won’t burn), please contact us.

Thank you!