How to Make Cucumber Chips & Five Chip Flavoring Recipes

My Personal Experience with Making Cuke Chips

I decided to try making cucumber chips for two reasons:

1. I love chips of any kind, the lower calorie, the better
2. I have a cucumber population explosion in my garden

I did some research on dehydrating cucumbers because it's one of the few things I have never dehydrated before.  It's not rocket science, it's pretty straight forward.  This is how I did it:

Updated  2019

How to Make Them:

1.  Washed and dried 6 medium cucumbers
2.  Sliced them with a sharp knife about 1/8 of an inch thick
3.  The slices that I planned to make with the salt and vinegar recipe (for me was about half, since it is my favorite) I placed in a covered bowl of red wine vinegar, over night.
4.  I sprayed the trays of my dehydrator with cooking spray, because cucumbers are bad to stick.  If you don't have cooking spray, then you can oil them with your fingertip dipped in olive or your preferred oil.
5.  Place the slices on the trays, and sprinkle them with
the desired flavoring mix.

Nesco American Harvest
Dehydrator 

6.  Turn on the dehydrator to 135 degrees. Check after four hours.  If they look fairly dry on top, flip each slice over and sprinkle with more seasoning.  Mine were not ready for this until after dehydrating for six hours, probably because my dehydrator is kinda old.  Your results may vary
7.  At ten hours, I started checking about every 30 minutes.  When they are crunchy, through and through when you bite into them. they are done.

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Five Recipes to Flavor your Cucumber Chips

I decided to get creative when I was making the chips and flavor them.  Salt and vinegar is my favorite potato chip variety, so that was definitely going to be the biggest part of them.  I also decided to try some other flavors, just to see if they were good.  I used the recipes that I had for making flavored potato chips.  I tried all of them except the really hot one.  I included the hot one here because I know a lot of people like hot stuff, but I cannot attest to how it tastes on cukes.  Make it at your own risk!   :P

Salt and Vinegar

• Red Wine Vinegar or whatever vinegar you prefer
• Salt

Soak slices overnight, then salt slices on the dehydrator rack

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Spicy

• 1/8 teaspoon garlic salt
• 1/2 teaspoon chili powder
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika

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Garlic Pepper

• 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
• 1/2 teaspoon Mrs. Dash

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Lemon Pepper

• 1/4 teaspoon lemon pepper seasoning
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

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Smokin' Hot Chips

• 1/4 teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/8 teaspoon onion powder
• 1/2 teaspoon chili powder
• 1/8 teaspoon mustard powder
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper flakes

Sorry, I don't have a picture of this recipe, I didn't make it because we don't care for hot chips.

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When the chips were done, this is what they looked like.  Despite the cooking spray I put on the trays, some of them still were stuck.

This is the net product of seven trays.  Four trays of salt and vinegar and one tray each of the others.  These are sandwich bags. 

If you are not used to dehydrating, it is a bit disappointing the net product that you get from all those trays.  However, you have to remember what a large part water plays in vegetables.  There is a good amount of water in cucumbers, so when it is removed, whats left is much smaller.  The good news is, that my cucumber chips are a success!  Both my husband and I like them.  While they will never be as good as potato chips, they are crispy and tasty and will help with those salt/crunch cravings.  They also will give us another avenue to use the cucumbers that continue to flood out of the garden!

Next I plan to try dehydrating some squash chips.  I seem to have a proliferation of butternut squash, so after I freeze enough to last us the winter, I will be drying some chips.  I will let you know how that goes.

Have a great week,

Jade    :)

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If you want to learn all there is about drying food, this is the book you want:

$9.99

I loved this book because it covered more than just dehydrating with a food dehydrator.  It also covers sun drying, oven drying, air drying and even drying in the microwave.  The author gives her opinion of the benefits and drawbacks of each method.

In addition to that, food storage is also covered in this book, as well as how to use dehydrated food and she even provides a lot of recipes for using dried foods.

This book is really all you need, if you want to learn to dry food.  I highly recommend it.

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Other Posts on Dehydrating

If you enjoyed reading about my adventure with dehydrating cucumbers, you may want to have a look at the posts I wrote about dehydrating bananas.  That was an adventure also!

Yes We Have Some Bananas, We Have Some Bananas Today - Post 1
The Dehydrating Banana Update - Post 2

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