This was something I wanted to play around with during No-Buy July; a snack food we could make at home from stuff we have hanging around in the pantry makes sense to me! They would be cheaper than the commercial ones and there would be no strange additives to worry about. We even used organic flours. To make things easier I used our pasta maker to roll out the dough and a ravioli wheel cutter to give the crackers a crinkled edge, although I could have used a pizza cutter or even sharp knife but I like the look of the crinkled edge.
My approach was two-fold, first I made a batch of the cracker dough, turned it into crackers as per the process below and then divided the unbaked crackers into 4 portions. The first one I left bare as a control, sprinkled onion flakes over the second portion, homemade curry powder over the third and a commercial biryani spice mix over the fourth. I only used my fingers to sprinkle the spice mixes and onion so it was a bit hit or miss, in future I will use a sieve.
The second experiment was to put the flavouring agent into the dough and then make the crackers as normal to see how the flavours worked out. I used garlic powder in one and some homemade chicken stock powder to flavour the other. I did wonder whether cooking the crackers would make the flavour stronger or weaker but in the event it make the flavour weaker, but the end result was pretty good anyway.
Recipe
1 cup baker’s flour
1 cup wholemeal flour
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons sugar
3 tablespoons of olive oil
2/3 cup water
For the batches I added the flavouring agent to I added 2 tablespoons homemade stock powder to one and 2 tablespoons of garlic powder to the other.
Process
1. Measure out the dry ingredients into a bowl (including flavour powders if used) and mix them around to combine (I used a whisk for this).
2. Add in the wet ingredients and mix ( I used fingers!) and knead them together to form a ball of dough.
3. Pat the dough between your hands to give it a rectangular shape and run it through the pasta maker on setting ‘1’, folding it over until it holds together as it goes between the rollers, then run it through on ‘2’ and then on ‘3’. This will get it to the right thickness.
4. Place the dough onto a flours surface and cut the crackers into the desired shape with the ravioli cutter or whatever you want to use. Pierce each cracker a number of times with a table fork so that they do not bubble up during baking.
5. If you want to add your flavours on top, brush some water onto the top of the unbaked crackers and then apply your chosen flavouring.
6. Place the crackers onto a silicon baking sheet so that they are slightly separated from eachother and bake in the oven at 230°C for 12 to 15 minutes. Towards the end of the bake, keep an eye on the crackers as they can go from perfect to burned in a short time!
Results
Sprinkled flavours
Control (unflavoured) – tasted OK, would go well with any number of dips.
Onion – The onion had a tendency to burn and it wasn’t the best tasting cracker I have ever had.
Curry – Definitely a winner! If I had a more even coverage for the curry powder they would have been perfect.
Biryani Spice – As for curry above!
Incorporated flavours
Chicken stock powder – I found these to be really great and took them along to a PSW meeting and the feedback from everyone was that they thought they were very good too. If you find them a bit salty for your taste, leave out some of the salt in the dough recipe.
Garlic Powder – I also found these to be good, but my personal taste is that I prefer the stock powder ones. I took these to the PSW meeting too and again, they were very well received.
The types of flavours you can sprinkle on or incorporate into the basic cracker is almost endless and I will definitely be trying crackers with our home made Mexican spice mix and onion powder too.
