Baked Salt & Vinegar Zucchini & Squash Chips

I’m slightly obsessed with salt and vinegar flavored anything. Chips, obviously. Almonds, which I recently discovered. I’m convinced that you could hand me salt and vinegar flavored cardboard and I’d like it. But in the spirit of combining health and taste-bud-delight, tonight I decided to use up the squash and zucchini that had been sitting in my fridge untouched for the past week. I’ve seen tons of recipes for zucchini chips, but salt and vinegar zucchini chips? I had to figure it out.

Ingredients

• 1 large zucchini
• 1 large squash
• 2 cups water
• 2 cups white vinegar
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Salt

Instructions

I’ve told you once and I’ll tell you again, I’m not a fancy chef. So, I don’t have a mandoline slicer, and I don’t have a dehydrator. If you have either of those, this will be a piece of cake for you.  But if you’re like me, a wannabe just trying to earn their wings in the kitchen, we’re doing this the hard way today. Use a knife and carefully cut the zucchini and squash into very thin slivers.  While you’re slicin’, preheat your oven to 225º (that was the lowest temperature my oven would go).

Lay the slices out on a kitchen towel or paper towel. Push down on them with another towel to remove as much moisture as possible.

In a bowl or ziplock bag, soak the zucchini and squash in a mixture of 2 cups water and 2 cups vinegar.  Refrigerate for one hour while the slices soak.

Line up the slices on a grill pan.  (I tried another batch on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper, but the bottom of the slices stayed moist and they needed to be flipped, unlike the ones on the grill pan.) Dab a small amount of olive oil onto the slices, and sprinkle with salt. Use less salt than you think is necessary. The slices will shrink up considerably, and the salt will become more concentrated. Some of my chips turned out entirely too salty, and I thought I had sprinkled on just the right amount. Learn from my mistakes…

Bake in the oven for 60-90 minutes. If your slices are very thin, it will probably take only an hour… thick slices on the other hand, perhaps an hour and a half. Mine took about an hour and 15 minutes. Check on them every 20 minutes or so, and once they are crispy take them out and serve! I’d recommend eating these all within the first hour or two of baking (they’re so light and tasty, it shouldn’t be a problem!). I put them in an air-tight container and tried some a few hours later, and then were already beginning to lose their “crisp-ness.”