Our Italian Pasta Dinner Night is this weekend, a little later than previous years. It's a night filled with family, good friends, food and drink. My family and I prepare a full course Italian meal, all made from scratch, from the appetizers to dessert and including the limoncello! It's a lot of work, but with everyone pitching in it's a lot of fun too, and at the end of the day well worth it.
One of the appetizers that I added this year to my antipasto platters is pepperoni chips. These little crunchy pieces of spicy meat are delicious. They are so easy to make and eat, because they are finger food, but watch out these are addictive as I found out! I couldn't stop eating them as I was making them, not really a breakfast item I might add, but hey I had to taste test them, right!
I made about 2 lbs of pepperoni chips because I am feeding a crowd. I purchased 2 big 1 1/2 lb bags of sliced pepperoni at BJ's and didn't quite use the whole second pack. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a medium size bowl with foil and set aside. Cover your baking sheets with foil to avoid some of the mess and catch the grease that drains out of the pepperoni. Put a cooling rack on top of the foil lined baking sheets. Line the pepperoni slices on the cooling rack but don't crowd them. I fit 5 slices across starting at the short end.
Bake for 7-8 minutes, depending on your oven, until crispy.
Remove from oven, slide off of cooling rack and drain on paper towels. Now, if you work fast on getting them off the rack and onto the paper towels while they are still hot and a little soft, you can blot them on top with a layer of paper towels by pressing just very gently to absorb the grease but be careful not to break the chips. The chips will get crispier as they cool.
This is what that medium size bowl lined with foil is for. Drain the fat off the baking sheets in between each batch of chips so it doesn't burn or smoke in your oven. Easy peasy on the cleanup, just let it coagulate, fold it up and toss it in the trash can.
Enjoy your pepperoni chips for snacking, in salads, or on an appetizer tray mixed with cheeses, roasted peppers and olives. Store the chips in a tightly sealed container, will keep for a few days at room temperature.
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