Foodie Friday- Homemade tortilla Chips

Today's Food Friday is comes to you from a great blog called Surviving a Teacher's Salary. (Original post here.) Being a certified elementary school teacher, I hold this concept dear to my heart! I LOVE reading this blog because Crystal is always posting amazing deals on educational items as well as fun recipes and activities for kids! Really, you should check it out if you've got school aged kids or you're a teacher like me! Take it away Crystal!

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If you have the time a great way to save money on a nice splurge is to make your own homemade tortilla chips! My husband loooooves chips to munch on, but we hardly ever buy them because our budget does not allow for that-not to mention that most of them are just plain not healthy! So he decided the other day that he wanted to make his own tortilla chips. 

A bag of tortilla chips cost about $2-4 depending on what brand you buy. If you make your own for $2.50 you can make over 6 bags or MORE for that price! AND they are a lot healthier & tastier too! 

He went to the store & bought a bag of corn flour. It was $2.48 for the bag.

He just followed the directions on the bag but he mixed the flour with water, and the tiniest bit of salt.

For a while we were hand pressing out the dough to make the chips, but soon realized how long that took! So we went on Amazon and bought a tortilla press for $14 to make things go quicker! It's very simple to use. Just put a very small ball of dough on the press..........

And close it up! We put some wax paper on one side of the press so that the dough didn't stick so much!

Here's what it looked like after we pressed the dough with the tortilla press.

It worked best for us to make a little assembly line. I pressed the tortillas & placed them in a plate like you see below.

My hubby threw them in the frying pan (no oil) and let them cook on high for just a minute or so.

Then he put all the semi-cooked dough discs on a separate plate.

When he got a plate full he would dump them in his deep fryer. We use canola oil or olive oil due to my son's allergies.

 

And after about 3 minutes we would check them & pull them out. I was a little concerned at first because look at all that oil-ick!

 

 But after we patted the chips with a napkin & placed them on a plate- voila- the oil was gone! (well, mostly!) Seriously though, the chips were absolutely delicious.  They were much better than bagged chips for sure! WOW! I wasn't sure how they would do if we left them out overnight so we experimented. Left overnight on a plate like this with no cover was actually not bad-just the tiniest slight bit of staleness, just barely. We also put some in a ziploc bag overnight and those were absolutely delicious- they tasted like we had just made them!

  

As you can see we just made round chips, they were quicker to make. If you want to make the triangle chips it is very easy- after pressing your dough down you just take a pizza cutter & slice up a triangle!

Making your own tortilla chips does take some time, but it is definetely worth it when you taste it! If you've got a family that has some munchy problems and wants a lot of chips- this is a great idea to try out. It's very simple. We made about double the chips shown in this picture with 1 cup of flour- and our bag of flour has barely been touched! We have a LOT more flour to make chips with....we'll be making our tortilla chips for my boys birthday party in a few months which will save us a good amount of money on snacks!

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As soon as I saw this post I immediately emailed Crystal and asked her if I could repost it for a Foodie Friday. Don't those chips look AMAZING?? I'm a huge chip eater (would take chips over cookies any day of the week.) I really can't wait to make some on the cheap! Thanks again Crystal! 

Edited to add: An interesting little tidbit sent to me by my dad. 

"The flip side of the coin is also interesting, saw it on a number of cooking shows. 

 

Perhaps you are making chili, and the recipe calls for a quarter cup of Masa as a thickening agent, and you don't want to spend $2.49 for a whole bag when you need so little. But everybody has a bag of tortilla chips lying around, so take a handful of the chips, pulverize them, and youve got your 1/4 cup masa and no waste!"

 

Thanks for the tip Dad!