Potato chips is easier to cook with than it looks. Here's how to choose, use, and store them, what to substitute, and 36 recipes to get you started.

What are potato chips?

Potato chips are thin slices of potato fried or baked until crisp and seasoned with salt, sold as a snack but quietly useful as a cooking ingredient.

In a recipe they are doing one of two jobs: adding crunch, or adding the salty, fried-potato flavor you cannot easily get from anything else in the pantry.

Crushed, a chip is basically a pre-salted, pre-fried crouton. That is why it gets baked onto casseroles and pressed into crab cakes, and even folded into cookies.

Most of the recipes here reach for plain salted chips. The clean potato-and-salt flavor plays in both savory and sweet dishes without fighting the other ingredients.

Cooking With Potato Chips

The classic move is a casserole topping. Crush a few handfuls and scatter them over the dish in the last 15 to 20 minutes of baking, and they brown into a crunchy crust without burning or going soft.

That golden lid is the signature of Chip Chicken Casserole, Potato Chip Tuna Casserole, and Crowd Chicken Casserole.

They also work as a coating that fries or bakes up crisper than breadcrumbs. Press finely crushed chips onto crab cakes or fish before cooking, the way Willie's Crabcakes does, and the salt is built in.

Hot, creamy salads use chips both ways. Hot Scallop Salad with Potato Chips and Hot Chicken Salad with Potato Chips fold some into the mix for body and scatter the rest on top so it stays crunchy through baking.

Then there is dessert. The fat and salt in a chip make it a natural in sweets, where it adds crunch and a salty edge to Potato Chip Cookies and Potato Chip Brownies.

Pairing and Common Mistakes

Salt and fat are what chips bring, so they love rich, creamy partners: canned soup bases, melted cheese, tuna, mayonnaise-bound salads, and butter. In sweets, that same salt sharpens chocolate and brown sugar. Because the salt is already there, hold back on seasoning the dish until you taste it.

To crush them cleanly, leave the chips in the bag or a zip-top bag and press with your hands or a rolling pin. Crushing in an open bowl sends shards flying and is hard to control.

The biggest mistake is adding a chip topping too early. Bake it from the start of a long casserole and it goes soft and greasy, losing the only thing it was there to provide. Add it near the end instead.

The second mistake is forgetting how salty chips are. A dish built on canned soup plus a full bag of chips can turn out aggressively salty, so cut the added salt elsewhere.

Choosing the Right Chip

Kettle chips and regular chips are not interchangeable in cooking.

Regular thin chips crush to a fine, even crumb that coats and bakes evenly, which is what you want for a smooth casserole crust or a breading.

Kettle chips are thicker and harder, cooked in smaller batches, so they crush into chunkier shards that stay crunchy longer. Reach for them when you want a coarse, sturdy topping that holds its crunch in a wet dish.

For flavor, plain salted is the safe all-purpose choice. Flavored chips like sour cream and onion or barbecue can be great on purpose, but they will season the whole dish, so use them only when that flavor belongs there.

Buying and Storage

Buy chips close to when you need them. Freshness is everything with a product this delicate, and a stale bag has already lost the crunch you bought it for.

Press the bag gently before you buy. A fresh bag feels firm with trapped nitrogen, while a soft, flat one has lost its seal.

Once opened, roll the bag down tight and clip it, or move the chips to an airtight container. Air and humidity are what turn chips stale and limp, not spoilage, so an airtight seal is the whole game.

Kept sealed in a cool, dry cupboard, an opened bag stays good for a week or two, and an unopened bag holds to its printed date.

If chips go soft but smell fine, re-crisp them in a 350°F (175°C) oven for 3 to 5 minutes. Toss them if they smell stale or rancid, since the frying oil eventually goes off.

Nutrition

Quick facts

Where to find potato chips: Potato chips are usually found in the snacks section or aisle of the grocery store or supermarket.

Food group: Potato chips are a member of the Snacks US Department of Agriculture nutritional food group.

In Chinese

土豆片

British (UK) term

Potato chips

en français

chips

en español

papas fritas

How much do potato chips weigh?

Amount	Weight
1 ounce	28 grams
1 bag (8 oz)	227 grams

Related

Snacks

Recipes using potato chips

There are 36 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 36 recipes