Sweet Potato Chips

Crinkle cut sweet potato chips in home rendered lard with a little sea salt. Yum!

Yesterday I rendered the fat into lard that a friend gave to me from the home grown pig he butchered. He has 5 grown children and many grand children. He and his wife raise animals for meat for the whole family, so he is always butchering something. They have more lard than they can use at this time, so they are generous enough to share. I am grateful and fortunate. His pigs run around the farm and are able to root, plus were milk fed and grain fed. 

Today, I wanted to show you how to cook potatoe chips in the lard. I used the lard I scorched a little. When it was heating, it did have quite a "piggy" smell, but none of that came through in the chips. They were delicious and I ate way too many. I saved the rest of the yam bits for a soup for tomorrow, uncooked of course. 

This old Saladmaster hand grater is years old, at least 20. I love it! This was a little finer than I should have done the chips.

Here is the bag of lard and the big pot. I squeezed the lard into the pot - easy!

the freshly thick cut sweet potatoes. I cooked them on medium high, about 7 out of 10. Perfect slow cooking and frequent stirring resulted in nice crisp chips.

a close up of the first test batch, not quite long enough cooked and the temperature was too high. I turned the heat down and cooked the next batch longer and they were perfect.

There were the curls of yam that resulted. I think they were too thin. The result was disappointing because they absorbed some of the lard. I ate them anyhow, bad me. They were still delicious.