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If you ever read Amelia Bedelia books growing up, you probably remember her literal take on chocolate chip cookies in “Amelia Bedelia Goes Camping” in which she added potato chips to chocolate cookies. Well, we’re here to say that she was onto something with that innocent culinary mistake. Potato chips are the popular salty snack that will give your next batch of cookies a major upgrade.
Cookies may be a classic dessert, but so is the iconic pairing of sweet and savory. Modern recipes for cookies have created a culinary trend for adding savory notes to otherwise sweet recipes; take, for example, this recipe for tahini shortbread sandwiches, or our argument for why white miso is the unexpected ingredient for better peanut butter cookies. Potato chips are a convenient, fairly cheap staple that brings both a salty and savory complement to a sweet cookie and a delectable crunch to contrast a soft, gooey center. Potato chips have an earthy and oily flavor that’s versatile enough to pair with many different cookie flavors. Plus, it’s simple enough to add potato chips to cookie dough. If you don’t want to add a whole chip, you can put a portion of potato chips in a plastic bag and lightly whack them with a rolling pin or scrunch the bag with your hands to break them down. Then treat them like any other cookie mix-in, adding the pieces to freshly formed cookie dough to fold in gently so as not to compromise their size or crunch.
Flavor combinations for cookie and chip pairings
A cookie is only as good as its ingredients, so just as you’d choose a high-quality butter brand or semi-sweet chocolate chips, the same goes for potato chips. We have a ranking of the best potato chip brands, and Deep River, Utz, and classic Lay’s are among our favorites. We also recommend these Kettle cooked sea salt potato chips, as they’re extra crunchy and will hold their shape as you fold them into cookie dough.
The saltiness of the potato chips will complement the sweetness of the cookies while also enhancing the specific dessert flavors you pair them with. And the possibilities of potential flavor pairings are endless. You can follow Amelia Bedelia’s lead and add potato chips to these ultra rich double chocolate cookies with dark chocolate chips. They are also the perfect addition to these brown butter chocolate chip cookies, or put the focus more on potato chips by incorporating them into a sugar cookie, adding them to our list of unexpected ingredients to add to sugar cookies. A peanut butter potato chip cookie would also taste delicious. But this is a great chance to experiment by adding potato chips along with other complementary cookie mix-ins like peanut M&Ms, butterscotch chips, raisins, and cranberries, for some original taste sensations.
