Sea Salt and Black Pepper Potato Chip Cookies

I’m very glad that my family and friends are so open-minded about trying new foods.  They willingly taste my various mad-scientist kitchen experiments and, even more importantly, they’re honest about the results. 

I’ve learned over time that people’s food preferences vary wildly.  What tastes perfectly good to one person may be really distasteful to another.  For example, I like my cookies soft, and slightly under baked.  My brother likes his cookies soft, but overcooked to the point of being slightly burnt.  My step-dad likes his cookies crisp and won’t eat any that contain chocolate.  My husband likes pretty nearly any cookie at all.

Naturally, when I get my friends and family to test my recipes, their feedback is almost always wildly divergent too.  I’m grateful for that.  It turns out that their opinions form a pretty accurate predictor of the response my recipes will get when I publish them.

With so many wildly varying opinions available to me, how do I decide which recipes I’ll share and which recipes I won’t?  It’s pretty simple really:  It’s my blog, so I share the recipes I like. 

That doesn’t mean I don’t take my tasters’ opinions into consideration.  I do.  Often, the suggestions I receive from my friends and family will cause me to go back, revisit a recipe, and make changes. 

I remade this recipe (adapted from the Potato Chip Cookie recipe in the July edition of Martha Stewart Living) four times, each time changing it slightly based upon what my tasters told me.  This is the final version, made with my favourite chips.  I like it an awful lot.  I hope you do too.

To make Sea Salt and Pepper Potato Chip Cookies, you’ll need:

• 1 cup unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 3/4 cup brown sugar, packed
• 3/4 cup granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs, at room temperature
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper (not pictured)
• 4 cups of coarsely crushed Kettle Brand sea salt and black pepper potato chips

Cream together the butter, brown sugar, and granulated sugar.  Add in the vanilla.  Beat the eggs and add them in too.  Mix until well combined.

In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, and pepper.

Add the dry ingredients to the wet mixture and stir them together to make a fairly stiff dough.  Fold in 2 cups of the crushed potato chips.

Form the cookie dough into 2-inch balls, then roll the cookies in the remaining potato chips to coat the outer surface of the dough.  I had a little trouble making the chips stick to the raw cookie dough.  You’ll probably have to use your hands to press them lightly into the surface of the cookies.

Place the coated cookies about 2 inches apart on parchment lined cookie sheets.

Bake the cookies on the middle rack of a 350ºF oven for 12 to 15 minutes; just until the bottom of the cookies brown and the edges begin to take on a little bit of colour. 

Let the baked cookies rest on the baking pans for about 5 minutes, then transfer them to a sheet of brown paper to cool completely.  (The paper will soak up some of the excess oil from the chips.)

You can store these cookies in an airtight container for up to 5 days.