Welcome to my first bonus post! For those of you who have been following this blog, you might have noticed that I’m posting once a week. But I’ve been doing a bunch of baking, and I have a lot of things to share. So this week I thought I would do a bonus post. We’ll see how it goes. And if I have more time in the future, I might do it again. What’s this bonus post about? One of my favorite things: BBQ potato chips.
I am a fan of BBQ potato chips. You might say I am a BBQ potato chip snob, or even a potato chip snob in general. Having grown up in central Pennsylvania, I had access to a lot of different potato chips, pretzels, and other snack foods, many of which you just can’t find anywhere else. Two of the best potato chip brands are Martin’s and Middleswarth. I’ll find myself looking up and down the snack foods aisle at the grocery store, unhappy with all the choices and not sure why, until I remember they just don’t have those brands where I live now. I’ve actually ordered them directly from the manufacturer and had them specially shipped here. They’re just that good. I’m not saying there aren’t other good potato chips out there, but the major brands pale in comparison.
So why all this talk about potato chips on a baking blog? Am I seriously going to tell you I put BBQ potato chips in a cookie? I mean chocolate and pretzels go together, but chocolate and BBQ potato chips? I had never even really considered it, but yes. They go great together.
How did I come up with it? As much as I’d love to take credit for it, it wasn’t my idea. I was looking for a new recipe to make a few weeks back and this one caught my eye. I’m a little bit of a sucker for BBQ potato chips, so I just had to try it.
Having none of my beloved Middleswarth or Martin’s on hand, I ended up using Deep River Mesquite BBQ chips. (Hopefully I’ll have some hometown favorites around next time I make them.) I have no particular affiliation with Deep River chips, they just happened to be in the local store. They’re different, particularly the mesquite part, but they’re good chips. They’re kettle cooked, which is the way to go with potato chips, which provides a nice crunch.
I’ve had a lot of luck making gluten-free desserts. I have a go-to gluten-free flour that I use (Trader Joe’s Gluten Free All Purpose Flour), and it has served me well. Time after time I simply substitute it for regular flour in a recipe, and voilà! Yummy, gluten-free desserts.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of those times. I cooked the cookies on the lower end of the recommended cooking time, but they didn’t seem quite done. So I cooked them a little bit longer. They still didn’t seem done. I eventually took them out, because I was worried I was cooking them way too long. It turns out that I should have taken them out sooner, as they overcooked. They also didn’t end up looking like the pictures in the original recipe.
They were flat, almost cracker thin, with hardly any substance to them. I’m not sure why they didn’t work out. If I had taken them out sooner, I’m not sure how much better they would have been, as they were thin at that point, too. My guess is that there was something about the gluten that was necessary for making these cookies work.
Don’t get me wrong, they were still tasty. My wife and I ate them up. They just weren’t what we were expecting. I vowed to make them again.
Try out the recipe, either original or gluten-free and let me know how it goes in the comments below.
Recipe courtesy of the Pescetarian and the Pig.
Needs Baked 