Making parsnip crisps is relatively easy to make in the air fryer. We love those veg crisps from the shop, so we decided to try to make our own at home.
Home Cooked
Home-cooked can be cheaper than store-bought and can also help reduce waste. A couple of parsnips left over from a roast that needed use. What could be made with a couple of sad parsnips? Parsnip crisps sprang to mind.
Air Fryer
The air fryer is ideal for making food crispy, from frozen fries to roast chicken. The air fryer gives you crispy chicken skin and crispy fries, and this would be no different for a parsnip, sliced and air-fried.
Perfect Slices
Perfect slices of parsnip are required to make the air fryer veg crisps. They need the same thickness, whether you slice them lengthways or circular slices. It isn’t easy to get perfectly thin sliced parsnips, and the fibrous nature means you need a sharp knife and plenty of patience. There is a cheat to perfect slices…
The mandolin. We have this one from Amazon. It has many attachments, but I just needed the standard slicer for the parsnips. I didn’t peel the parsnips; I just topped and tailed them. It is cutting off the top and the end that looked past its best. The mandolin handle has a spike that holds the veg tight as you swipe it across the sharp cutting blade. It’s straightforward and quick to get perfect slices. The blades are very sharp, and using the handle keeps your fingers safe.
Add fat
Parsnips taste better when roasted in fat. You can get the same flavour (with much less fat) with an air fryer. But you must add fat to get the full flavour from the parsnip crisps. Add 2 Tbsp (Tablespoons) of cooking oil for four smaller parsnips. Don’t worry if you add a little too much oil. The excess won’t get used and stays in the air fryer’s bottom. Not enough oil and you won’t get the best parsnip chips, but they will still be good.
Toss the parsnips in the oil while in the mandolin container or transfer them to a bowl for tossing. Whether they are long, thin slices or small circles, ensure all of the parsnip slices are coated with oil.
Air Fryer Basket
Place your perfectly (uniformly) sliced and oiled parsnips in the air fryer.
Don’t overcrowd the basket, but they can overlap slightly. As the cooking progresses, you will shake the parsnips to move them around, and they will shrink back. As they shrink as the moisture is removed, more space will appear around the parsnip slices, making them easier to shake and move around to reduce the overlap.
Cooking Progress
as cooking progresses, keep opening the air fryer basket every 5 minutes to shake and separate the slices. You can see in the picture above how much space has now appeared around the parsnips. But you must ensure each slice gets a good cook without overlapping another slice. This ensures they finish cooking at the same time.
Cooking time
Set the air fryer to 280°F (140°C). Because they are so thin, the crisps can overcook very quickly. The regular shaking of the basket also lets you check their progress. You can always turn the temperature down by 50°F if they get crispy edges but are still soft in the centre.
Overall, the cooking time was 17 minutes.
Cooking long and low helps to control the cooking. Too hot, and they will blacken before you realise they are overdone. A cooler cook helps to dry the crisps out more evenly and gives you a better chance to catch them at just the right time. If they are cooking too quickly, reduce the temperature. Adding more time to the cook is easy, but you can’t take away the temperature.
The delicious aroma of roasted parsnips alerted me to the best time to stop the cooking. I had set the air fryer timer to 20 minutes, but at 17 minutes, I could smell the lovely aroma of the parsnips emanating from the machine.
Opening the air fryer basket mid-cooking is not a problem, and you get very little heat loss from the small basket when it’s open. Not having a window on the cooking progress means you must check by opening the fryer drawer to see the food.
You can’t beat homemade for knowing what went into the meal with no preservatives or additional salt (unless you want to). Tastier than the shop-bought too 🙂