Healthy snacks – fruit and veg crisps

At New Year I posted some ideas for Healthy snacks. Two of the snacks we tried were apple and banana crisps and we all agreed that they were delicious. We also agreed that there were lots of other fruit and veg that would taste great as crisps so we’ve been trying them out over the last few weeks.

These crisps are really easy to make. The general rule is to thinly slice your choice of fruit or vegetable and lay them on a baking tray lined with greaseproof paper, leaving space for air to flow between each slice. Then add any flavouring and cook at 100°C for three hours, turning them over half way through the cooking time.

Alternatively, if you are making root vegetable crisps you can halve the cooking time (and cut out having to turn them during cooking) by using a vegetable peeler to slice them, making an extra thin crisp.

You can use any herb or spice to add flavour to your crisp. We added paprika, thyme and ginger to the root vegetable crisps (not all at once!) and cinnamon on our apple crisps. You don’t need to add any oil to cook these crisps, though, making them a really healthy alternative.

The kids were fascinated by these snacks. They helped to choose which food we would use and have been asking me to make more. One of the highlights for me was walking into the kitchen to see Vic tucking into parsnip and thyme crisps – she refuses to eat parsnip when I serve it as part of a meal.

To keep these crisps fresh I wrapped them in foil. None of them lasted more than a day so I can’t really say how long they’ll stay fresh for 😁.

What we made:

Parsnip and beetroot crisps

I think the parsnip crisps were my favourite out of the vegetables we tried. They are reasonably sweet and give a good crunch. They also tasted great coated with thyme. I used a knife to slice half of them and cut the rest with a vegetable peeler so that they’d be ready in half the time.

The beetroot crisps gave a great crunch and looked amazing. I don’t think they had as much taste as the other crisps we made, if we cook these again I’ll be adding extra flavouring.

Sweet potato crisps

I was in a rush when I made these so made skinny crisps using a vegetable peeler. I’ve got a soft spot for sweet potato so of course I was happy to eat these.

Strawberry and kiwi crisps

These two were my favourites. They looked amazing and the entire batch of both of these got eaten as soon as they were cool. I cut the cooking time for these – they were done in two and a half hours, I turned them after an hour and a quarter. The strawberries weren’t completely dried out. The skins were crunchy but the centres soft, they tasted like jam with crunchy bits. The next time I cook these I’m going to keep them whole and cook them for the full three hours. The kiwi crisps were somehow sharp and sweet at the same time and my mouth is watering just thinking about how good they tasted! I coated them in lemon juice before cooking to stop them turning brown and it definitely made a difference to the final colour.

Apple and banana crisps

These were the crisps that we made the first time we tried fruit crisps. The kids have been asking me to make them again. The apple crisps were lovely, although a couple of the kids weren’t keen on the skin. When I first made the banana crisps I cut them too thick and they ended up chewy rather than crispy (the kids still enjoyed them even though they weren’t what I was trying to make!). This time I cut them in 1cm slices and they turned out well. I coated these in lemon juice before cooking them and this made a difference to the final colour.

Fruit and vegetable crisps are going to be a regular in our house from now on – they are a fun way for the children to eat healthy food and they taste amazing. Let me know what you think if you try any of these, or any that I haven’t mentioned.

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