How to Make Tortilla Chips From Scratch

Series Summary

Cooking is a great way to express creativity in the kitchen. Developing new recipes and finding new cooking utensils can be a fun activity that always leads to trying great new foods. Even amateur chefs can experiment with different fruits, vegetables and main dishes, coming up with a unique style of food that is all their own. In this free video series on cooking, a professional chef demonstrates a few cooking techniques that can be used every day or for entertaining. Find out how to make homemade tortilla chips from fresh tortillas and a bit of olive oil. Learn how to create unique appetizer recipes for entertaining, and even find out how to incorporate vegetables into a cake for all to enjoy. Wow friends and family at the next social gathering with these helpful cooking and baking tips.

Video Transcript

"I love to teach kids how to cook and it never fails when you teach kids things like tortilla chips they say you mean you can make tortilla chips? I'm Karen Lasher, Chef owner of "Around the Table" in Camas, Washington and I'm going to show you how to make home made tortilla chips. We are going to start with corn tortilla chips. You can either use white corn or yellow corn tortilla chips. These are white corn tortillas. The yellow corn are just a little more yellow. Start by cutting a little stack in half and then we are just going to cut depending on how big you want your tortilla chips, triangles, just go around or you could make large ones by just cutting larger triangles. After you have cut them, put them in a bowl, separating them nicely so that they kind of fall into the bowl as a group and then squirt some or pour some oil in, some canola oil works well, you can use olive oil, it will add a little more flavor to your tortilla chips, a vegetable oil and then just toss them lightly to coat all of your tortillas with a little bit of oil. After you have coated them with oil put them on baking sheet, lined with parchment paper and spread them out. You want them all to fit nice and crispy so make sure that they are not touching too much. You don't want any big mounds like this one in the middle here, those aren't going to crisp up very much and I like to add my salt at the end. I like to add the salt when they come out of the oven. Therefore, if there is someone that has an issue with sodium and is trying to reduce sodium in their diet they can have a tortilla chip without the salt and you can pull those aside. So at this point we are going to bake them in a hot oven so around 400 degrees and we're going to put them in the oven and I have some here that we've done that we're going to pull out to show you as they come out of the oven and they're nice and crispy. Now this is the point where you are really going to want to add your salt because they are hot, there is still a little bit of oil and it is going to stick, the salt will stick to the oil and you toss those up and there you have fresh warm from the oven tortilla chips ready for salsa, guacamole or any other thing you would like."