A Life From Scratch - A Year From Scratch - Crackers: Thin and Wheat-y

Thursday

Oct142010

Crackers: Thin and Wheat-y

Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 09:01AM

I was very tempted to make this post simply a list of ingredients, the name of the method, and a series of pictures. Regular readers should know how to make this dish with just that information. Still, I had some funny things to add, so I figured I might want to go ahead and write about it.

What we are making today is crackers. This is an application from Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for More Food, which is his second book and is about baking. I recommend running out and picking it up, because it is a great way to learn how to bake, rather than just learning things to bake. Yes, here at A Year From Scratch we love Alton Brown, Michael Ruhlman, Mario Batali, Shirley Corriher, and Harold McGee.

Most crackers are biscuits. At least, they are made with the biscuit method. The ratios may be a bit different, but the technique is the same. In this case, we have the following ingredients:

Dry Ingredients

142g Whole Wheat Flour
142g AP Flout
50g Sugar

Fat

57g Butter, grated

Wet Ingredients

113g Milk
1 egg (50 or so grams worth, but 1 large egg should be fine)

Toppings

2tbl Butter, Melted
Salt

First we preheat the oven to 325°F, then we weigh out our dry ingredients.

Weighed flours

Sugar

Take the dry ingredients for a spin in the food processor to aerate them. You could whisk them instead, or you could use any number of sifting devices. Sifters don't mix the ingredients very well, though, so to be effective you'd have to sift them several times, which is a pain. Instead, I recommend a food processor or some whisking.

Aerate the dry ingredients

Grate in some butter. I used a Microplane here, but that's probably excessive. It's just that my cheese grater was dirty, and I had crackers to make.

Incidentally, depending on the speed of your scale, you may find that you've grated too much butter and have to remove it.Once you've grated the butter, you'll find it's probably not that useful for storage. Set it aside for melting to top the crackers later. You may be tempted to taste a little of the grated butter, especially if you used a Microplane. This is perfectly normal and not to be ashamed of. Make sure nobody's watching, though, because if they see you eating plain, grated butter, it might seem shameful when they make fun of you. Ignore them, but don't eat too much raw butter. That's just weird.

Once you've finished grating and tasting, put the bowl with the flour and the butter into the freezer to keep the butter cold and firm.

Grate in the butter

Measure out the wet ingredients. Here's some milk:

Milk

Now, while it's true that my food styling and photography are far outclassed by other bloggers, I find that nobody has my cat. So I've decided to work her into my photos to make them seem more impressive. Add the egg:

Egg

Mix the wet ingredients. Do not let your cat drink them, no matter how cute she may be.

Work in the butter. You should lose about half of your butter to coating flour, and the other half should be in roughly pea-sized clumps. Return the bowl to the freezer for a couple of minutes.

Work in the butter

Make a well in the center of the flour and pour in the wet ingredients.

Well method

Stir with a rubber, wooden, or silicone implement until roughly combined. Do this as little as is necessary so that you don't form too much gluten.

Mix dry and liquid ingredients

Knead the dough briefly into a ball. Go ahead and freeze it for a few more minutes if you have the time to spare.

knead the dough

Next you roll out the dough. You're looking for something about 1/16" thick, or roughly the thickness of a Wheat Thin. You can do this with a rolling pin and some 1/16" rubber bands, or you can roll it out to somewhere in the 1/4" range and use your pasta roller to finish it off. I used the pasta roller.

Then cut the cracker dough into cracker shaped sizes. You can be more careful with yours than I am with mine, but I am often cavalier about the size and shape of my baked goods. This means that things I cook are often unevenly cooked, which doesn't bother me too much but can certainly cause problems. It certainly wouldn't work in a commercial kitchen. I recommend taking more care than I take.

Cut the cracker dough

Separate the crackers a bit. You'll notice we didn't add any leavening to the crackers, so we don't need to worry about docking it, nor do we need to worry about it rising and spreading, so they don't have to be all that separated.

Separate the crackers

Bake in the 325°F oven for 25-35 minutes, until they are golden brown and delicious.

Bake the crackers

Remove, brush with butter, sprinkle on salt, and cool on a rack.

Brush on butter, sprinkle on salt

So why do we go through all this for crackers? Crackers are easy to purchase, after all, and are generally tasty. However, crackers have a high surface area to volume ratio. That means that anything that's going to make this crackers last for long enough to go cross-country and sit on a shelf is probably going to involve preserving chemicals. Also, flavors disappear after not too long with thin items, so extra salt is necessary in order to boost the flavor.

Besides, you can make any kind of cracker you want this way. You can top it with herbs or spices, you can work in cheese, you can make them sweeter, you can make them more savory. You can customize the shape to spell a message or to resemble something appropriate to a party theme. You have complete control over these crackers, and they're really not that hard to make.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of the biscuit method. The reason for that is because I rarely use it. Melanie is much better at it than I, and this is my first article for AYFS that I've gotten to use it. As I get more practice, it will become easier, but even so, it's not a hard technique. It's just a technique that requires a little patience, and not even all that much patience compared to, say, the straight dough method, which is used to make pizza and bread.