Home Made Is Easy: Tortilla Chips

There’s a blogger out in cyberspace (link here) who deserves a huge applause for testing and figuring out this chip’s seasoning recipe. It’s great! Combined with homemade tortilla chips (made easily w/all food storage ingredients) I can confidently now persuade my kids and husband away from buying the tempting and naughty bag of Doritos at the grocery store. {Three cheers!}

While still not completely guilt free, these chips are a much better health choice than the store bought ones. Plus they taste amazingly like the real thing and, let us not forget, can be made 100% from food storage! {I’m in heaven.} On with the recipe…

Makes: 2 1/2 – 3 cookie trays worth of chips

Prep time: 30 minutes

Ingredients:

Homemade Corn Chips

*check out Jan 14th’s post for details on the ingredients needed for homemade corn tortillas. In making chips, it’s the same basic recipe but I’ve found it works better to cut the baking soda in half (reflected here).

4 cups Masa flour

2 1/2 cups water

1/2 tsp. salt

1/4 tsp. baking soda

Seasoning Mix

http://myfoodstoragecookbook.com/2012/03/24/homemade-cool-ranch-doritos/

1/2 packet Ranch dressing mix (4 tsp.)

1/4 packet cheese powder from a box of white cheddar mac and cheese (4 tsp.) *see note

1/2 tsp. garlic salt

1/2 tsp. salt

1 tsp. onion powder

pinch Paprika

Other

Sunflower oil (preferred here for it’s light flavor and tolerance for high heat — soybean oil would also work)

cast iron tortilla press

wax paper

gallon sized ziploc bag

Instructions

Mix together corn tortilla dough, using clean hands to mix. Using your hands will help to be able to tell if the dough is too wet or too dry. Working with small to medium sized dough balls, press dough in between two sheets of wax paperusing a tortilla press. After initial press, use a rolling pin to press the dough as thin as possible. It still needs to be able to transfer to the skillet in one piece, so be mindful of that, but the thinner you can press the dough the crispier your chips will be.

Carefully remove the tortilla from the waxed paper. I’ve found it’s easiest to remove the paper that was on the bottom first, since after being rolled with the rolling pin the wax paper creases on top of itself more so on the bottom than on the top. The top layer of paper is easier to remove last, avoiding accidentally tearing the tortilla dough.

After removing tortilla dough from the waxed paper, place onto a very hot skillet and allow to cook for 10 seconds or so, watching carefully so that it doesn’t burn. Flip over and cook 10-15 seconds on the other side.

Once all the tortillas are cooked and somewhat cooled, brush each one with oil and stack one on top of the other, until a reasonable number of tortillas have been stacked. Use a knife (with a small dish as a template) to cut off the ragged edges of the tortillas. Next, use a larger knife to divide the tortillas into desired sized chips and lay each onto a cookie sheet to bake. Bake at 350 degrees for 10 – 15 minutes, allowing the chips to brown. Be sure to watch carefully after 10 minutes of baking to be sure they don’t burn. Since they’re thin, they’ll burn quickly.

Once the chips are cooled a bit, spray with oil and place in a Ziploc bag along with 2-3 tsp. of seasoning powder. Shake to coat the chips with seasoning (adding more if wanted) and enjoy!

Bake 10-15 minutes, watching carefully.

Spray with oil (or very lightly with water) and shake to coat with seasoning powder.

Ready to serve. Enjoy!

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Notes:

I did try using Knorr brand’s Alfredo sauce mix in place of the recipe’s white cheddar mac and cheese packet and (to me) there was a noticeable difference in taste, the white cheddar mac and cheese making it better. I don’t like buying things where I only use part of the product, but in this case I’ll just have to suck it up and use the left over dry macaroni noodles for something else.

Testing these chips out on my kids (against the original chips) was really fun. They’re still not as crunchy as the original Doritos but it didn’t seem to phase my kids which I was happy about. They said that for the flavor they liked these ones better even though they weren’t as crunchy! My one son (8 yrs. old) even said he thought the Doritos chips “tasted weird” now that he’d tried the other ones. I call that success!

Updated note: I realized after posting that Hidden Valley Ranch Mix, which I hadn’t thought to check on, actually does contain MSG. To make your chips MSG free you can try making your own Ranch Mix using this recipe if you wish:

Dry Ranch Dressing Mix

1/2 cup dry buttermilk powder
1 tablespoon dried parsley, crushed
1 teaspoon dried dill weed
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon dried minced onion
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/4 teaspoon ground pepper
Combine all ingredients in the container of a food processor or
blender and process on high speed until well blended and powdery
smooth.

**Updated **Simplified Tortilla Pressing Instructions using Flexible Cutting Mats