I recently found myself with a few too many radishes from our CSA (community-supported agriculture) share and got to thinking, I wonder what they taste like as chips? Turns out, very good indeed. And they’re kinda pretty, too.

Here’s how to dehydrate them:

1 cup fresh radishes, sliced thinly (no need to peel)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/2 teaspoon coarse salt (or to taste)

You’ll have washed the radishes before you sliced them, so wrap them in a layer of paper towel and pat them dry before throwing them in a medium bowl with the olive oil and salt. They need to be dry so that they can be evenly coated with the oil – plus, you don’t want to have all that extra moisture if you’re going to dehydrate them. Combine all the ingredients.

Place the radish slices in single layers on the trays of your dehydrator. Don’t let the slices touch.

Set the dehydrator to 135 degrees Fahrenheit for 5 hours. Check and rotate the trays at the 2 hour mark. Check them again at the 4 hour mark to see how things are coming along. The radish chips will be done when they are crisp and dry, with no moisture left. The importance of slicing your radishes very thinly will come to the forefront here: you really need to slice them thinly and uniformly or they won’t all dry at the same rate.

You can definitely double or triple the ingredients in this recipe and do a big batch, if you like. It will depend on how large your dehydrator is – mine’s not very big. If your racks aren’t full and you have a bunch of kale, make chips out of that at the same time…you don’t want to be wasting all that electricity and heat with a half-empty dehydrator.

If you don’t have a dehydrator, you should be able to do this in your oven instead – slow and low is the key. My oven’s settings don’t allow me to go lower than 150 degrees Fahrenheit so I would have to prop the oven door open to let air in and cool it down even further. Oven drying definitely requires some adjustments, and it’s not very efficient, but if you are making a large batch, you might be okay with doing it this way.

(And something fun, if you have access to the specialty ingredient…if you have any smoked salt on hand, use that – it’s perfect for this recipe. We have wonderful friends who own a smoker and they have very generously gifted us with smoked salt, but you can purchase it at many different markets and specialty shops. It’s such a treat!).