Three different kinds of potato chip cookies: sandies, brown sugar, and chocolate chip.

National Potato Day is Saturday. You might think that I would eventually run out of unique ways to highlight potatoes on their special day. That is the retrograde thinking of someone who does not appreciate the wonders of potatoes. If you feel that way, you might as well stop reading now!

This year I have a very unique cookie from the seventies, made with a very different potato chip than they would have been made with then. Back in the seventies and even early eighties, these would have been made with everyday thin potato chips, such as Lay’s or an off-brand, or, perhaps, to use up the dregs of a Charles Chips can before the next can arrived. By the time you got to the bottom of the can, they were pre-crushed, perfect for baking!

One of the amazing potato innovations over my lifetime has been the slow takeover of the potato chip industry by kettle-style chips. They’re better all around: crunchier, greasier, and more flavorful. I don’t know specifically when they first started appearing, but I do remember the first time I had a real kettle-style chip. It was in Los Angeles in 1990, on one of the side streets connecting Hollywood and Sunset. The chips were “Krunchers! Jalapeño Chips”, cooked in peanut oil. They had just a faint flavor of peanuts to go along with the jalapeños, something that Borden, sadly, viewed as a flaw and corrected soon after.

I always wondered where these chips were going… (Ezrawolfe, CC-BY-SA 3.0)

When I tell people that I want to stop acquiring more cookbooks and start using the ones I already have, this is one of the things I mean: researching weird cooking through the ages. About a year ago last April, I was looking over the clearance rack at one of the grocery stores I frequent, probably Big Lots!, and I came across a bunch of kettle-style jalapeño potato chips for $0.62. It reminded me that I’ve been wanting to try one of the ostensibly stranger cookie recipes that I see regularly in community cookbooks, potato chip cookies.

It occurred to me that if potato chip cookies are good, jalapeño potato chip cookies would be even better.

The reason the chips were deeply discounted in April 2023 is that they expired in April 2023. But 2023 was a busy year for travel and less happy events, so I didn’t get around to trying my idea out until April 2024.

I thought, well, they ought to be good enough for cooking, and maybe now I’ll be able to open them without uncontrollably snacking. Happily, or sadly, depending on my perspective, not only were potato chips a year out from their expiration still good enough for baking, they were still good enough to eat out of the bag.

That turned out not to be a problem. They were 8-½ ounce bags, and four ounces of potato chips makes about a cup of crushed potato chips. Which meant that, even after the inevitable snacking-related losses, there were more than enough chips in two bags to make the three cookie recipes I’d highlighted.

The Texas potato chip sandies were very good with Italian lemon sorbet.

These cookies from Eva Layson’s book were a great variation on brown sugar pecan cookies. These were the potato chips I used in each: a year past its expiration.

Good old-fashioned chocolate chip cookies—with walnuts and jalapeño potato chips!

There should have been more than enough to make the four cookie recipes I’d highlighted, but such are the spoils of war. On a completely unrelated note, the “cookie count” in these recipes is the real count on pulling the cookies from the oven. It fully reflects the necessity of snacking on the raw cookie dough to verify quality.

I made them in order of which cookies I thought would be best down to which I thought would be worst. I was slightly out of order. The first recipe was from a cookbook I’d been wanting to try more of.¹ Eva Layson’s Homemade Cookie Book is an interesting collection of recipes from the wife of a world-traveling ambassador. They retired to Hawaii, and, as far as I can tell from the hints given in the cookbook, dedicated themselves to being great grandparents and good neighbors.

Her recipes were collected over a lifetime of entertaining in the foreign service, and then used over another lifetime entertaining in the grandparent service. It’s the same cookbook I got my Easter candy cane oatmeal crispies from. She provides a basic brown sugar recipe with potato chips and nuts for the add-ins. I recommend pecans.

Potato Chip Pecan Cookies

Servings: 36
Preparation Time: 30 minutes
Eva Layson
Review: The Homemade Cookie Book (Jerry@Goodreads)

Ingredients

• 1 cup brown sugar, packed
• ½ cup lard
• 1 egg
• 1 cup flour
• ½ tsp baking soda
• ½ tsp vanilla
• 2 ounces crushed jalapeño potato chips (about ½ cup)
• ½ cup chopped pecans

Steps

1. Cream together the sugar and lard.
2. Beat in the egg.
3. Stir in the flour, soda, and vanilla and mix well.
4. Mix in the chips and nuts.
5. Drop by teaspoonfuls on ungreased cookie sheets.
6. Bake at 350° for 10-12 minutes.

In each of these cases, of course, you can substitute normal potato chips for the jalapeño ones I used.

Eva Layson’s potato chip cookies were ridiculously good and she knew it:

Sounds weird, but they are delicious!!! Have fun with your friends trying to guess the secret ingredient!

If I hadn’t already done the work planning out multiple recipes for this blog post, I would probably have stopped right there. But I had more chips and a blog post to write. So from Hawaii I moved on to Potter County, Texas and another of my favorite cookbooks. It’s one of the Bicentennial cookbooks in my collection. Lily Ward’s potato chip cookies are completely different from Eva Larson’s. They’re more like pecan sandies than the sort of oatmeal-style cookies from Larson. Besides not having any leavening, there’s also no egg, and it uses white sugar instead of brown sugar.

Potato Chip Sandies

Servings: 60
Preparation Time: 40 minutes
Lily Ward
Review: Potter County Bicentennial Cook Book (Jerry@Goodreads)

Ingredients

• 1 lb butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 3-½ cups flour
• 2 tsp vanilla
• 1-¾ cup crushed potato chips (not fine, about 7 oz)

Steps

1. Cream together the butter and sugar.
2. Mix the flour in well.
3. Mix in the vanilla and crushed potato chips.
4. Roll into small balls.
5. Place on lightly-greased baking sheet and press down with a wet fork.
6. Bake for 20 minutes at 350°.
7. Cool completely on rack before eating.

If they have to be compared, these are even better than Eva Layson’s. But they’re not really comparable. They’re completely different cookies, melt-in-your mouth sandies or shortbread. Like the pecan cookies above, they’re great with milk, and would also be great with tea or coffee. Because the potato chips aren’t crushed as fine—they replace the nuts this style cookie normally has—the chips are also very visible in the cookies, making the flavor less of a surprise.

Like most sandies, they’re best eaten after they’ve cooled.

While I enjoyed using jalapeño chips for this variation, it is probably the potato chip cookie most suited for standard potato chips.

After Texas, I returned to Michigan for my home town’s America’s Bicentennial cookbook—another of the Bicentennial cookbooks in my collection, obviously. This recipe is very similar to Layson’s, with the addition of chocolate chips.

Who doesn’t like chocolate chips? But will they go well with jalapeño potato chips? Tune in next paragraph, and see!

Chocolate Chip Potato Chip Cookies

Servings: 60
Preparation Time: 35 minutes
Mary Seng
America’s Bicentennial Cook Book Featuring Favorite Recipes From Hesperia, Michigan

Ingredients

• 1 cup lard
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 cups flour
• 1 tsp baking soda
• 2 cups (about 8 oz) crushed potato chips
• 6 oz bittersweet chocolate chips
• 1 cup walnuts
• ½ tbsp vanilla

Steps

1. Cream the sugar and lard.
2. Mix the eggs in well.
3. Sift the flour and soda together and stir in.
4. Stir in the potato chips, chocolate chips, and walnuts.
5. Stir in the vanilla.
6. Drop from tablespoons onto lightly greased cookie sheets.
7. Bake for 12-14 minutes at 325°.

This, of course, is the recipe most likely to have used a can of Charles Chips in the original. They’re quite good, but they’re also a little over the top. To make them fully over the top they’d need to include raisins, of course, but still, potato chips, chocolate chips, and chopped nuts are a lot of flavor and the different flavors step over themselves a bit.

Not that I had any trouble eating them. But it’s the first two recipes that will go into my rotation.

The best overall cookie came from Eva Lawson, brown sugar cookies with potato chips and nuts.

The most delightful of the cookies were from this Texas cookbook, basically, potato chip sandies with only potato chips taking over fully for the ground nuts that normally go in sandies.

And a great everything-cookie were the chocolate chip walnut potato chip cookies from my home town!

I meant to do four cookies, but the final bag of chips didn’t hold the full 8-½ ounces it was supposed to and… I ate the 3 ounces that remained after I removed the four ounces for Mary Seng’s chocolate chip potato chip cookies. But that means there are still three recipes I’m interested in, mostly recipes that vary from these three by only using egg yolks instead of the full egg. If I see potato chips drastically reduced again, I may do a second Potato Chip Cookie Trilogy.

Or I may not. The chocolate chip cookies are very good, but the Layson and the Potter County cookies are amazing, and may crowd out further experimentation. The potato chip sandies especially are a step above. If you make only one of these recipes, make the sandies.