Crunchy Homemade Bagel Chips

Are you ready to discover the joy of making your own crispy and flavorful homemade bagel chips? Heck yes you are! This is a super simple snack recipe that is a great way to use up leftover bagels.

Transform your favorite day-old bagels into a fun snack with a simple slice and bake method. This homemade bagel chip recipe uses just three ingredients and is so easy to customize with your favorite seasonings for a personalized touch.

The method here will be familiar to those of you who have made my homemade focaccia croutons or some of my other easy snack recipes like the spicy goldfish crackers and oven Chex mix.

The main difference is that bagel chips are baked at a higher temperature — it's a faster recipe and we get a nice bit of browning!

I usually make these bagel chips when I have day-old or slightly stale plain homemade bagels or my overnight New York-style bagels around and no room in the freezer to store them. But they're also so good made with lots of different bagel flavors like blueberry bagels, everything bagels (with the everything bagel seasoning in the dough), and pumpkin spice bagels!

Ingredient Notes

Here are the ingredients that you'll need to make these homemade bagel chips! See recipe card for quantities.

• Bagels - Your favorite bagels. You'll have the best success with bagels that don't have any chunky inclusions (e.g. raisin bagels) as they're harder to slice thin by hand, but pretty much any of my unique bagel recipes can be turned into bagel chips. Day old bagels work best, as they're already slightly dried out. That said, I've done this with fresh baked bagels too; they sometimes just need a few more minutes in the oven before they're crisp!
• Olive Oil - This helps the bagels toast without burning and helps the salt or any other seasonings stick. You could use other types of oils or even melted butter but I've found olive oil gives the bagel chips the best flavor.
• Salt - I use Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt which half as salty as other brands. If measuring by weight, it doesn't matter what brand of salt you use. But if you're measuring by volume and using a different brand of salt, even a different brand of kosher salt, cut the amount of salt in half.

Other Optional Bagel Chip Seasonings: Cinnamon sugar, DIY chex mix seasoning, pantry pesto, Italian seasoning, Old Bay, paprika, everything bagel seasoning (pulsed in a spice grinder to turn it into a powder), garlic salt, cayenne, crushed red pepper flakes, etc. You can definitely get creative here!

Instructions

Making homemade bagel chips is honestly so easy you hardly need a recipe at all. You're basically just slicing your favorite bagels super thin and toasting them until they're crispy and dry.

You'll need to use a SHARP, SERRATED BREAD KNIFE for the slicing. If your knife isn't sharp and doesn't have a serrated edge, you will have a no good, terrible, really bad time trying to slice your bagel chips.

To avoid shredding the bagels as you slice them, let the teeth of the bread knife do the work for you.

Saw back and forth applying little-to-no downward pressure. You don't want to collapse the bagels or you'll get uneven slices. Saw back and forth and let the sharp teeth do the cutting work for you.

More surface area = more room for olive oil and salt and toasty delicious Maillard reaction browning in the oven!

Arrange the soon-to-be bagel chips in a single layer on a sheet pan. I tried doing this in a bowl and tossing them all with a glug of olive oil like I do when making homemade focaccia croutons, but it was hard to get an even distribution of olive oil on the bagels with that method.

Then use a pastry brush to dab each thinly sliced bagel chip with a bit of olive oil.

Don't have a pastry brush? A folded paper towel or a squeeze bottle will also work.

You could also use an olive oil spray instead. I just don't usually have one of those in my kitchen so using regular olive oil is more practical for me.

Toast the bagel chips in a 350°F oven for 15-20 minutes, stirring or shaking the pan every 5-7 minutes to avoid hot spots.

If any chips are getting particularly dark quicker than the others you can use a pair of tongs to remove them early while the rest of the bagel chips keep baking.

That's it! Remove the bagel chips from the oven and let them cool completely on the sheet pan, then transfer to an airtight container to store for all your bagel chip snacking needs!

Storage Notes

Homemade bagel chips can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 4 weeks.

As long as the bagel chips were fully dried in the oven and fully cooled before you stored them, they will stay good.

Moisture = mold developing, so make sure they're cool and completely dried throughout before putting them in an airtight container. And if you see mold, throw them out!

Practical Tips and Recipe Notes

• A full batch of homemade bagel chips will need a regular sized oven, a half batch can usually be baked in a toaster oven.
• When testing to see if the bagel chips are fully dry, look for the thickest chips on the sheet pan — if the thickest ones are dried throughout (they snap neatly and don't have any chewy texture when you bite them) then it's safe to assume the thinner ones are fully dried too!
• You can absolutely use pretty much any flavor of bagel to make homemade bagel chips. If the bagels you're using have a cheesy top (like my tomato basil pepperoni bagels or jalapeno-cheddar bagels) you'll want to try to remove the cheese and peppers or pepperoni from the top before you slice them, if you can. If you're baking flavored bagels from scratch to turn into bagel chips, just bake them without the cheesy toppings so you get the flavored bagel without the added moisture from the toppings.
• Homemade bagel chips are so good on their own but also great as a snack dipped in cream cheese or homemade goat cheese, creamy hummus, spinach and artichoke dip, easy guacamole, and more!

📖 Recipe