We had a bumper crops of sweet potatoes last fall and I've been dehydrating cooked slices of sweet potato to make a healthy snack chip. The ones that don't come out as nice get ground into sweet potato flour.

I've found this to be a really tedious process.

I started out by washing then pealing the sweet potatoes.

Then I would run them through my slicer and bake or microwave the slices in a covered dish (uncooked dried sweet potato chips are not tasty.)

Finally, spread the cooked slices in the dehydrator. Once crispy brittle, they are ready as chips or to be ground.

Everyone seems to like the chips and they are a good healthy snack but it is so tedious to spread the cooked slices. The over cooked slices get too soft for easy handling and then to turn into little bits while the under cooked slices area really easy to handle, they don't come out tasting quite as nice. It is really difficult to get enough perfectly cooked slices and then spread them out on the dehydrator trays.

I've tried spreading the raw slices on parchment paper and cooking them spread out but they tended to scorch and dry out before cooking. It seems the sort of steam baking in a covered dish produces better results (like sweet potato baked in it's skin.) I tried baking the sweet potatoes before slicing them but my slicer mashes them more than slicing them then and doing it by hand would be endless.

Any ideas how I can go about steaming sweet potato slices all spread out? Or How do I manage to slice baked sweet potatoes without mashing them?

By the way you can dehydrate the mashed baked sweet potatoes but it takes forever to make them brittle dry (dry enough to grind into flower) and they are too hard to actually snack on when dried that way.

We have made some breads using some of the sweet potato flour along with regular flour. Not too bad, I still need to work on my recipe though as my bead making skills are not very good yet.