Another one of our April recipes was to try our hand at crackers. We saw these: What? Are you serious?? and decided that we needed to make our own, stat.
First up, we wanted to use whole wheat flour because we’re nifty like that. We also wanted to try a few cheeses, and maybe add some rosemary?
We did need something to make the shapes, however. We searched high and low for some shape that would work, and the only thing we came across was a heart. It was the smallest cookie cutter we could find and believe me, we looked at every single one at Sur La Table, and that was all we could find. (And a hippo.) So that’s what we went with. We also got a pastry cutter for good measure.
First we measure our cheese. We had calculated we should use 8 ounces of each cheese. Do you know how much 8 ounces of cheese is? A lot. This many, in fact.
Here’s the 8 ounces of Parmesan cheese. Delicious.
Do you know how long grating cheese takes? Corelyn showed up 20 minutes into the grating process. That’s how long. It was intensive.
Ahh, cheese. In all it’s grated glory. Now, you might ask why I don’t/we don’t just buy it grated? Something about pre-grated cheese freaks me out. I had never bought it until after college, because my parents always had a block. Something about it seems more processed to me, whether or not that’s true (but I suspect it is.) Anyways, so I always go with a block, and grate myself. That’s my spiel about cheese.
To keep it consistent, and a little more scientific, I insisted that we also weighed our flour.
It ended up being 16 ounces of flour, or about this much. Just think that you need 2 parts flour to 3 parts cheese.
We also pulsed some dried rosemary because we decided that probably would make our crackers delicious (SPOILER: we were right.)
So we mixed it all together…and we forgot the salt. Don’t be like us: salt!! And add some milk, and some water (1/2 cup of each…)
You end up with a ball of dough. Delicious.
Begin to roll it out, pretty thin.
Then obviously you should start cutting out shapes.
Don’t worry. If you get to a point (like we did) where you just couldn’t cut any more hearts, then you can switch to the pastry cutter, and make wavy crackers!
Much faster. Ahh…
Woah, mama. This recipe made a lot of crackers…
Delicious. These were definitely a work in progress, but so good. Next time, I think we’ll use a little all-purpose flour, definitely salt them, and make sure the oven is hot enough. This time around the oven was taking F-O-R-E-V-E-R. I am going to say 400 degrees, about 15 minutes, but check ’em. You want to under bake a little because when they come out they’ll harden, science yadda yadda, and you don’t want them to break any teeth. Yield is about 2.5 quarts (we measured in ziploc bags…)
[addtoany] Yum