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Design

How To Make Transparent Potato Chips

It’ll take forever, but when you’re done, you’ll be able to eat snacks that you can see through.

There are two kinds of people in this world: the kind that open a bag of potato chips and indiscriminately start snacking on its contents without even looking down at them, and then there are those that look at a potato chip and ponder, what IS this? Who does it resemble? Could it ever be more than this? For those of your who fall into the first category, congratulations. You are completely normal human beings. However you, the one staring at the chip that looks like Abe Lincoln, please step into our kitchen.

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Now, we at The Creators Project are not exactly a pack of Emerils. In fact, the last BAM! we heard came from a capacitor with the polarity reversed. However, that doesn’t mean we don’t appreciate innovation in food. We like to believe that big-thinking inspiration is not limited only to the traditional definition of art, and something edible we saw recently blew our minds just a little bit.

We kicked the habit of eating shards of glass back when we were teenagers, but these transparent potato chips brought back sweet memories of those adventurous days. When you think about it, there really is almost nothing in this world that is both transparent and edible, so there’s great novelty value to this recipe. It’s a little nutty to consider that you’ll be crafting individual potato chips, perfect little works of art that will be devoured mindlessly by a hungry snacker. Just psych yourself out like you’re making a sand mandala.

Now let’s make some invisi-food.

For this project, you’ll need an oven preheated to 375 degrees (F), 8 Yukon Gold potatoes, high-quality finishing salt or Kosher Salt, 1/2 cup olive oil, 4 cups water, 4 tabelspoons potato starch, a squeeze bottle, and an Arduino. Gotcha! Forget the Arduino.

First, wash the potatoes and place a 1 cm deep slit into each one. Toss them with salt and olive oil. Don’t eat them yet.

Next, place the potatoes on a baking sheet and put them in the preheated oven for 25 minutes. Don’t eat them yet.

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Bring the four cups of water to a boil. For the love of god, don’t drink this. Pour it over the potatoes. Cover, and let it sit for two hours. There’s a variety of things that you could do in these two hours of down time. You could watch two DVR-ed episodes of “60 Minutes.” You could watch Rounders, which is exactly 120 minutes long. You could eat 14 large bags of Baked Lay’s. You could eat 38 small bags of Utz salt and vinegar chips. Or you could eat three and a half bags of Lay’s, nine and a half of the Utz, and have an hour left over to hate yourself. Before you know it, ding! Two hours are up.

Pull out the potatoes and do with them what you will, feed them to your pets, mash them into your hair, we completely don’t care. Place the remaining liquid in an airtight container. Watch Rounders exactly 8.65 more times, and as soon as John Malkovich licks his Oreo for the last time (seriously, that was his tell?), rush to the fridge and retrieve your liquid chip base.

Heat up the liquid in a pot and add the potato starch. Whisk it until it turns into a thick gel. Fill up your squeeze bottle with this goo and preheat the oven to 135 degrees (F). Squirt your liquid chips on to the baking tray and bake for 8-10 hours. Oh man, what will you do for 8-10 hours? Sleep? Na. Make transparent potato chips? Already doing that. Throw in Rounders for a couple more goes. As soon as Edward Norton starts to look like Ben Affleck, turn off the TV and go retrieve your chips. Hey! Where the hell did they go?! Oh, right. They’re invisible.

[via Instructables]

@ImYourKid