Homemade wheat crackers

Crackers are fun to make. The 1st crackers I made were wonderful lavash crackers from a terrific book,  The Bread Baker’s Apprentice. This is not about those. I’d made those crackers twice and I wanted to try something different. One of my favorite blogs is kitchensimplicity . Blogess and mom, Cheri shares all sorts of wonderful recipes and takes beautiful photographs of her work. Her tag line is “Real food doesn’t have to be complicated.” These crackers looked delicious, “real and uncomplicated!”  Christmas week I was baking and hanging around a lot in the kitchen- perfect munchie opportunity, crackers sounded good-  so I decided to give it a go.

The hardest part of this recipe is rolling the dough out thin enough. Cheri gives a tip about rolling out very thin dough. She suggests you place the dough between two sheets of parchment paper and roll on top of the parchment. Using this technique you can turn the parchment to roll the dough in a different direction, rather than turning the dough. To get nice thin crackers you run the risk of it tearing when you move it or sticking to the counter. This is really a great solution. It’s a little awkward at 1st, but I have confidence you’ll figure it out. I did!

stack-a-crackers

I didn’t change a thing in her recipe  this first go. BUT

I do want to figure out how to make the salt stick a little better. My salt fell off. I crunched up more salt and put it on after baking, but that made them just a tiny bit saltier than I wanted them to be. If any of you out there reading (if anyone is out there reading) have any tips about keeping salt attached to a cracker I would certainly appreciate it. Also, I made the mistake on the 1st pan of taking them out of the oven too soon. They were a little chewy. Don’t be afraid to roll really thin dough, and leave them in the oven at least 8 minutes maybe 10 minutes or more. But watch them like a hawk! It only takes seconds to go from “perfect” to “damnit!” The 2nd batch I let bake for almost 12 minutes and they were delicious. We ate them as soon as they were done. Between Michael and Frank they were gone in 20 min.

Okay, okay… I confess most of them were gone before Michael or Frank even knew they were ready!