Homemade Crackers

I know, I know. I KNOW what you're thinking. I'm nuts. It's true. I can accept it. But really, these are good and they're not hard (are they Dana? Come on, back me up here!) In fact, not only are they not hard, but I think they're pretty doggone easy, and you can whip them up while Lindy's cheeseball ripens in the fridge.

So first of all, a little background on this cracker recipe. There has been a "Food Storage Wheat Thins" cracker recipe floating around the church for decades. I remember my mom making them. Actually, I don't remember it, but when I tried the recipe, I was hurtled back to my childhood immediately by the smell and taste. I asked my mom if she ever made them and she said "Probably!" It was probably on the same night she made Wheat Pilaf. (just kidding, Mom!) So here is the original recipe that I am posting here for INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. Do not make these. They're gross. The good recipe will follow.

Wheat Thins

1 3/4 cup whole wheat flour
3/4 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cups white flour
1/3 cup oil
1 cup water

Mix dry ingredients. Mix oil and water and add to dry ingredients. Roll out, prick with fork. Sprinkle with salt. Bake at 350 for 30 minutes.

So I made that recipe, and just the smell of them made me gag. The whole batch went in the garbage. But I really wanted to make crackers from scratch! So I bought a box of Wheat Thins and read the ingredients, and then did a google search to see if I could find a copycat recipe with similar ingredients. I found one on Bob's Red Mill web page that sounded good, so I tweaked it a little and gave it a try. They turned out really good! So here is that recipe, with pictures and instructions. Sorry my pictures are horrible. They're blurry and yellowy and ugly, but I barely had time to take the first pics, so I'm not doing it again! You'll have to get the idea with these.

In a medium bowl, whisk together:

3/4 cup whole wheat flour (whole white wheat flour is my personal preference)
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking soda
2 T. brown sugar
1 1/2 T. dry buttermilk powder*
2 T seeds (sesame seeds, poppy seeds, or a mixture of the two is good), optional

*although buttermilk powder is a somewhat unusual ingredient, it can be found in most grocery stores in the baking isle. I use it all the time in place of fresh buttermilk in recipes. It's quite handy and has a long shelf life. If you'd rather use fresh buttermilk, leave out the powder and use 1/2 cup buttermilk in place of the water later.


Now here's the really cool thing you can do with this. You can mix up a whole bunch of batches of these crackers up to this point and bag them up in Ziplocs and put them in the freezer where they will sit just waiting for your next cracker emergency. I like to keep several cracker mixes in my freezer, labeled with the ingredients I need to add.

And those ingredients are:

1/2 cup water
3 T. oil or melted butter

Add these to the ingredients in your bowl (either freshly mixed, or dumped out of the bag from your freezer) This is olive oil I'm using here, but use whatever you have.

Stir together to make a soft dough. It will be very soft and sticky.

Don't over-mix the dough. It should be stirred just until the flour is all absorbed, and not kneaded at all. Once it's all incorporated, cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let sit for about 10 minutes. This lets the whole wheat flour absorb all the liquid that it wants.

After you let it rest, divide the dough in half (eyeball it) and plop half of it on the bottom of a regular baking sheet that has been greased or sprayed well with Pam. You can also use a silicone liner, which is what I usually do, but for these pictures I showed just a plain old baking pan because not everyone has silicone liners. If you do have one, by all means, use it. If you do, you don't need to grease it at all.

Once your blob is on the pan, cut a piece of saran wrap the size of your pan. Place the saran wrap over the dough and begin rolling with a rolling pin right over the saran wrap.

If your pans are kind of warped like mine, you may not get too far rolling with a rolling pin, but this is a really soft dough, and you can just press it and smooth it with your hands. This is where the silicon liners really come in handy-- you can have the silicone liner flat on your counter, roll the dough and THEN put it on your warped pan to bake! :) But if you have just a pan to work with, smooth it out the best you can with your hands.

One half of the dough will cover the sheet pan entirely. It will be very thin. When you have it all smoothed out, remove the saran wrap. It will come right off.

We're almost there! Now just the finishing touches. I use a pizza cutter to score the dough into cracker squares. You don't have to cut all the way through the dough, but you can. Just don't press too hard because I don't want you to scratch your pan or damage your silpat because then you'll be mad at me. Just lightly score so that you can break the crackers apart easily after they're baked.

After you do several lines vertically, turn the pan to make some horizontal cuts. Finally, sprinkle the dough with a generous sprinkling of salt (table salt, sea salt, kosher salt, whatever you have), and you can sprinkle it with some extra seeds or whatever floats your boat. I used some extra sesame seeds here. You can get creative here with garlic salt, onion salt, etc.

There they are, all beautiful and ready for the oven. See how my edges aren't straight, and some of the dough has oozed over the side of the pan? Doesn't matter. People will eat them anyway. If you want to get really picky you can trim the edges with your pizza cutter, but why?

Oh, and don't tell your 6-year-old daughter that pricking with a fork is not necessary. She thinks it's an important job! (by the way, the batch in the picture below was done on a silicone liner, which is why it looks like it's right on the counter).

Now Bake at 350 for 14-15 minutes or until golden brown and crisp. They might be slightly soft right out of the oven, but they'll most likely crisp up as they sit. If they don't, you can always stick them back in the oven to crisp for a few minutes.

See, I couldn't even get the picture taken before there were two crackers swiped from the bottom corner! The kids had these taken care of in no time. I was lucky to have some to take a picture of after they were broken apart into individual crackers. Here's a really blurry picture for you!


Now go make some crackers!