Eat Out Eat Well

potato chips

Do You Eat Chips and Cookies Straight from the Package?

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Pile of potato chipsIt shouldn’t come as a surprise that the size of the package your food comes in influences how much you’ll eat. The larger the package, the more you tend to eat from it.

And, if you’re eating from the bag while you watch TV or work on the computer, it’s likely that as you mindlessly move your hand from bag to mouth you don’t realize how much you’re eating or whether you’re full of not.  So you probably just keep eating until you get to the bottom of the bag – and then eat all of the crumbs, too.

  • It’s easier to stay away from chips and cookies if the bag isn’t in your line of sight – out of sight, out of mind.
  • If you do buy jumbo size packages because they’re cheaper, put the excess somewhere inconvenient so you’ll have to work to get at it –like the basement, garage, or a high shelf that you need a stepstool to access. If you have to work to get the food it might take some of the desire out of it.
  • Don’t eat straight from the package.  Divide up the contents of one large package into several smaller portions. Put your portion in a bowl, on a plate, or even on a napkin. Count out your chips, crackers, and pretzels or only eat from a single portion size bag.
  • Who can stop when there’s an open bag of salty, crunchy food right in front of you? It’s amazingly easy to just keep until the bag is empty. A dive to the bottom of a 9 ounce bag of chips (without dip) is 1,260 calories. One serving, about 15 chips, is 140 calories.
  • And, leave the broken pieces of cookies or chips in the bag.  Remarkably, pieces of cookies and broken chips have calories, too!

Potato Chips the Way They Used To Be

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Saratoga Potato Chips

I have a soft spot for Saratoga Springs, New York, home of Skidmore College, my alma mater.  Saratoga is also known for  — to name a few things — the Battles of Saratoga (1777, a turning point in the Revolutionary War), its spa, Saratoga spring water (which I couldn’t stand the first time I tasted it), and another of my favorite spots, the racetrack with its incredible wooden stands.

What I didn’t know is that Saratoga is also credited as the birthplace of American potato chips.  Originally called Saratoga Chips, they are usually credited to George Crum, the Native- and African-American chef at Moon’s Lake House in Saratoga Springs who first prepared them in 1853.

In the 1920s chips were handed out in wax-paper bags. In the 1930’s they were packaged and became a commercial snack food.

We now call them plain old potato chips, Saratoga having vanished from the name.  There’s another big difference, too.  To make classic Saratoga chips, the Browns, 1940 authors of “America Cooks,” told you to slice potatoes “to fairylike thinness” and fry them in lard. A 1904 recipe from The Times called for frying them in olive oil, which gave the potatoes a nutty flavor, and, as we now know, was a lot healthier than many of today’s commercially used oils – or the once used lard.

Modern Day Potato Chips

Modern day potato chips come in a multitude of flavors: vinegar and salt, sour cream and onion, cool ranch, and barbecue.  Some are ribbed or ruffled and some aren’t, they are packaged in noisy foil bags, are plentifully salted, and sometimes are stamped out in identical sizes and stacked in a cardboard tube.  Don’t you wonder what they use to make those flavors?

An eight ounce bag of chips has 1242 calories, 766 of them from fat.  It contains 85.1 grams of fat (24.9 grams of which are saturated, 1192 mg of sodium (slightly more than half of the daily recommendation), and 14.9 grams of protein.

Pringles come all nice and neat and layered in a tube.  But, what happened to just potatoes?  Here’s Pringles’ ingredient list:  dried potatoes, vegetable oil (contains one or more of the following: corn oil, cottonseed oil, and/or sunflower oil), wheat starch, maltodextrin, rice flour, salt and dextrose.

A one ounce serving size of Lay’s classic potato chips is made from potatoes, sunflower and/or corn oil, and salt.  It has 150 calories, 10 grams of fat (1gram saturated), and 2 grams of protein.

Bottom Line:

Sometimes you gotta love the chips.  However, there are some good choices and some not so good choices.  Oven frying your own is probably the best choice – you get the vegetable lightly coated with olive oil and however much salt and herbs you prefer.

Some commercial brands now come oven baked, too.  If you are buying a bag of chips  look for the kind that is made from real potatoes rather than dried potatoes mixed with sugars, salt, and preservatives.

For home made oven fried potato chips, wash the potatoes well and slice them thinly, about 1/8-inch,  keeping the peel on. Brush both sides with olive oil (you can use a light coating of cooking spray if you are watching your calories) and arrange the slices on a baking sheet in a single layer without crowding. Sprinkle with salt and herbs, if desired. Bake in a preheated 375 degree oven until nicely browned and pretend you’re in Saratoga.