I’ve been playing around with making crackers as a healthier alternative to all the other awesome snacks that are out in the market trying to addict me to their engineered flavors.
After initial some attempts over the past couple weeks, I sat down and converted Mark Bittman’s recipe to grams. Using his numbers and experimented with a batch and I think I’ve finally come with a good ratio – 1:2:7:0.2
10g cheese
20g water
70g all purpose flour (generic target organic brand)
2g salt
The result was a nice dry dough that I could run through the pasta roller (I ran it to thinness 6 out of 8). The pasta roller saved me a ton of time over rolling by hand and resulted in consistent, even bakes in the toaster oven.
By using the pasta roller, I unintentionally recreated the “water crackers” that I used to enjoy at art openings. So as a bonus I understand the origin of their name, since I had never realized that water and cream crackers were an oppositional pair.
For further experiments, I’d like to come up with an alternate version using sourdough starter, since these crackers did come out a little flat. I’d also like to try my hand at cream crackers, using milk instead of water.
However, the biggest thing is finding simple ratio for a dough that works in the pasta roller, because I now have a good home base for future experiments.
