Makin’ Crackers

The other night I found myself with a serious craving for crackers and hummus. See, I don’t have a sweet tooth so much as a salty carb tooth, and I really wanted crackers. Alas, I was also so poor I couldn’t even afford a packet of saltines, but I did have some flour in the pantry. Ding ding ding! I could make crackers!

Well, the only recipe I found in The Joy of Cooking that night involved yeast and rising times, and since I didn’t really want to wait until midnight for crackers, I forgot the whole idea and finished watching my movie, snackless. The next day, though, I went onto the interwebs, and lo! with the wonders of technology I found plenty of yeast-less cracker recipes of all types.

What I decided to make is a variation of a recipe for sesame wheat crackers. I didn’t have sesame, and what I really wanted were rosemary crackers, so I just did a little changing and a little tweaking, and in less than an hour I had my own homemade and carb-craving-satisfying crackers.

Whole Wheat Rosemary Crackers

(This is just a half-batch; I wasn’t sure how they’d turn out so I didn’t want to go crazy. You could double it easily, but this actually produced a fair amount of crackers.)

• 1 1/4 c. whole wheat flour (I used bread flour)
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. baking powder
• about 1/4 c. dried rosemary
• a few dashes of garlic powder (I might use more next time, because I couldn’t taste it at all)
• 1 1/2 T. olive oil
• 1/2 c. warm water

Mix the flour, salt, baking powder, rosemary, and garlic powder in a large bowl. Add the oil and water, and mix well. You might want to get in with your hands to really get everything mixed up. The dough will be a little sticky, but it shouldn’t be hard to handle. If it feels too sticky, add a little more flour.

Flour a work surface, and a rolling pin, and roll the dough out as thin as you can. You’re aiming for 1/16 of an inch, but you don’t have to get a ruler out or anything, just roll it really, really thin.

This picture above is not thin enough. It’s not like they’ll be bad or anything, but I noticed that the thinner crackers were crispier than the thicker ones.

When I rolled out the dough it looked like Texas:

Obviously I should not be left alone at home for long periods of time.

Preheat the oven to 350F. My recipe specified putting the racks in the bottom half of the oven, which I actually did, but I’m not sure how important this is. Cut the dough into cracker shapes, whatever shapes you want. I just used a butter knife and cut them into rough squares. Lightly oil your baking sheet (you’ll probably need two) and place the crackers about 1/2 an inch apart on them. Then bake them for 15-20 minutes.

Let them cool off a bit, and you’ve got crackers! Wasn’t that easy? You can try all kinds of variations on the spices, too–next time I think I’m going to go for cumin crackers. I might also consider a mix of white and wheat flours, because these were a little dense. But a pretty awesome snack, and if you think about it, probably a ton healthier than store-bought, too. At least you know what’s in them.