Late last year, just prior to Christmas (2009) as I sank a glass of wine and had some cheese and crackers. I wondered much do we spend on crackers? So some back of the coaster numbers. If we have one box/packet per week and at least an extra packet at major holidays and when we have guests, we would roughly have 65 packets per year. At $3 per packet we are coming close to $200 per year.

So can I make them? Well we bake our own bread (bread machine) and bread rolls (oven) so I could just tag them on to that.

So here is my recipe

Ingredients

• 2 Cups of Flour
• 1tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 2/3 cup warm water
• 1/3 cup veg (I use olive) oil

Preheat ove – 200c. Combine flour, salt, baking powder, oil and water. Make dough. I now split the dough into 5 equal portions. With my hand I flatten the dough (keep a towel over the remaining dough so it does not dry out) and now using the pasta maker roll the dough out. I roll the dough till the number three setting on the pasta maker. If rolling by hand I guess get it as thin as possible, but really using a pasta maker is so much easier.

On the flat sheets now season. You can use whatever you like. Poppy seeds, cracked pepped, salt, chilli.  Use a rolling pin lightly to push the seasoning on. Now cut the flat sheets out, I use a ravioli cutter, but a knife is fine. Place on a baking tray. Now do not forget to prick them with a fork. If you do not they will rise. Put them in the oven and bake for 3 minutes then remove and turn them over and bake for another 1 minute. Now these timings are based on a thickness from the pasta maker. So you may need to experiment. Also the batch above makes probably approx 3 packets worth of crackers.

From the first batch you can see the changes. The thickst were by hand (rolling pin and not pricked), the middle ones in the oven for approx 5-6 minutes and the last ones as I have described above.

1st batch of crackers

And a different view

1st batch of crackers

And the finished product

Crackers and chees anyone

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 12th, 2010 at 5:45 am and is filed under Food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.