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Cheap paradise: Daiso’s microwave potato chip maker is healthy, easy, and delicious【Taste test】

Casey Baseel Jul 28, 2020
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With this, there’s really no reason for us not to eat potato chips every day.

Imagine that you’re craving a hamburger, and you have two to choose from. Hamburger A is fresh off the grill, and Hamburger B was cooked days, if not weeks ago, and has been sitting sealed in a plastic bag ever since. Which would you choose?

Hamburger A, right? And you could replace “hamburger” with just about any other food in that scenario, and we’d still choose the freshly cooked one. So now the question is why don’t we apply that logic to potato chips too?

The answer is that making your own potato chips is a pain. Since we don’t have our own deep fryer, we’d have to cook them one by one, which would take forever and still leave us with tons of oil to dispose of and a filthy kitchen to clean up…or so we thought.

Once again, we found the latest improvement to our quality of life at the 100 yen shop, our local Daiso branch, to be precise. The Chip Maker for Microwaves promises us the bet of all worlds with quick, no hassle, no mess home-cooked potato chips, and so it was an instant buy for us. It’s incredibly simple to use, so let’s dash through the process.

Step 1: Wash and slice a potato. We used a multi-slicer, but you can just a kitchen knife if you’re confident in your thin-slicing skills.

Step 2: Pat the slices dry with a paper towel.

Step 3: Weigh your slices. The Chip Maker for Microwaves can make up to 100 grams (3.5 ounces) of chips at a time, and the cooking length depends on how much potato you’re cooking at once.

Step 4: Load up the Chip Maker for Microwaves with the potato slices.

Step 5: Stick it in the microwave and start cooking.

▼ Microwave cooking time for 60 grams: 6 minutes (500 watt microwave), 5 minutes (600 watts), or 4 minutes (700 watts)
Cooking time for 100 grams: 9 minutes (500 watt microwave), 8 minutes (600 watts), or 6 minutes (700 watts)

Step 6: Oh, wait, there is no Step 6, because that’s all you have to do. Well, unless you count “take your chips out of the microwave once time is up” as a step.

You might have noticed that nowhere in the directions did we add any oil. That’s not an oversight on our art, since the Chip Maker for Microwaves’ directions don’t mention adding any either. Honestly, we were worried that this would make the potato slices feel closer to steamed than fried, resulting in a mushy mouthfeel.

To our pleasant surprise, though, once they’d cooled down enough for us to grab one with our fingertips, we discovered that they were as crisp as any chips we’d have gotten out of a bag of factory-made ones from the convenience store.

▼ Taste-tester Go Hatori’s notes: “WHA-? AMAZING!”

But while texture is important, the main reason anyone eats chips is for the flavor. In addition to not using oil, you might also have noticed that we didn’t put any salt on these, so how dd they taste?

Fantastic. Not having any oil or salt in the way let the flavor of the potato itself have full command of our taste buds’ attention, and as long as you’ve got a nice-quality spud to start with, the Chip Maker for Microwaves will produce chips that you can enjoy just as they are.

Of course, no one’s stopping you from sprinkling on some salt or other seasonings if you want, or maybe soaking them in some green tea if you want to follow our advice from this experiment. Really, it’s up to you, or in our case up to Go, since he’s hanging on to the company Chip Maker for Microwaves for the rest of the summer so that he can enjoy some snacks while soaking in the outdoor rotenburo he made for himself on his balcony.

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