Chioggia beets, your naturally psychedelic beets.

Or so I learned when I sliced into these for the first time. I’ve always used the red and gold varieties with a heavy favoring of the golden. But these? These are new eye candy! They taste pretty good too. More of a softer creamier taste than the red variety.

Now let’s talk about this recipe. I’ve decided to go ahead and share this recipe with one caveat… you promise to use a mandolin or have insanely mad knife skills. I have neither resulting in a partial success. But I believe in the method enough to be convinced that if you are able to slice these thin enough, you will get the desired result. Now of course you could just throw them in the deep fat fryer but that kinda negates some of the healthfulness we have going on here.

The recipe itself is a pretty standard method: thinly slice, toss in some oil, bake, and season right out of the oven. Pretty self explanatory. Now this is where that whole uniform thin slice thing comes into play.

I did not have uniform thin slices so I ended up with everything from black to still soft and tender. I tried to be crafty and pull off the thin ones and continued baking the rest to try and get everything to crisp up. After several 5-10 minute intervals I knew I had a loosing battle on my hands.

The good news is that even if they don’t come out evenly cooked and crispy, they are still worth devouring. It was incredibly easy to eat 3 beets worth of chips in a few minutes. The few crispy ones even reminded me of Terra Chips.

Once a mandolin is in hand, I will be tackle this again.

Beet Chips

• 3 beets washed, trimmed, and thinly sliced
• 1-2 tablespoons olive oil
• Kosher salt to taste

Pre-heat oven to 350°F.

Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Toss beet slices with olive oil and spread across the pans in a single layer.

Bake anywhere from 10 – 20 minutes. Start checking at 10 and go from there. Cooking time is going to greatly depend on how thin your slices are.

Once crisp, pull out of the oven and season with salt.

Serves 1… 2 if you feel like sharing.