We’ve Gone Crackers!

Today's episode of R&D (thinly disguised as fooling around in the kitchen) is a mess of crackers ... and an even more messy incidental baklava disaster!

We decided to work on crackers, with mixed success, go check the recipes out and follow along! Serious Eat's recipe for Homemade Cheese-Its was the clear winner ... Ellie and I ate about half a tray, you know, in the interests of science. Really, I swear.

The second recipe we tried, Fine Cooking's Seeded Crackers, did not translate well to gluten free, though we did some different things to them that were interesting.

First, the cheese crackers:

These were a) easy and b) fun and c) took really well to having cool additions like BACON! and HERBS!

Can you tell? I liked this one.

We did change it a little bit. I was kind of gun shy after not putting a little xanthan gum in the lady fingers, so I did put 1/2 tsp xanthan gum in with the gluten free flour on this one - however, I think this recipe might actually be fine without it, or with less, so I'd recommend trying a small batch without xanthan gum to start with. We also decided that a little ground chile is always good with cheese so we added 3/4 tsp cayenne (mine is 35,000 heat units, a medium-hot cayenne), also with the flour, which was perfect - it gave it a little bit of a kick without being a mouth burner. Other than these changes, we made the first batch of cheez-its as written, EXCEPT - the recipe says to grate the cheddar cheese with a microplane. I did get good cheddar, it was the Cabot 2-year aged stuff, very nice, but still not really hard enough to grate with a tiny microplane (it's soft-ish and would just gum up those little holes), so we grated it and then chopped it, as you see:

The dough is fairly smooth, and felt disconcertingly like Play-Do, which was both weird and fun

Here's another note: the recipe tells you to roll out the dough and then transfer it to a baking tray. Do yourself a favor and roll it out on a tray-sized piece of parchment or waxed paper, then you can just lift the whole thing on the paper to move it to the tray! The reason they have you do this is so that you can brush the cut crackers with the salted water all at once (MUCH easier than doing each tiny cracker!) so it's a good idea, but it doesn't say to separate the crackers from each other after you do this ... so we didn't and I have to say that the second batch, which we did separate, baked more evenly and all the crackers had the nice crispy edges that you want on a cheese cracker. You can see the bacon-flavored crackers in the group photo on the right, they're the darker ones:

Don't get me wrong - the first batch was so good that Ellie and I ate about half of the tray while we were working on other things, but they would have been even better with crispy edges.

For the second batch, we decided to try putting bacon in it, because bacon and cheese. 'Nuff said. Except that remember, BACON IS SALTY. So cut back the salt on top!

On to the seeded crackers …

These, though tasty, were a really disappointing texture. Even right out of the oven, or right after they cooled, they were ... cardboardy and a bit weird, though the seed topping was yummy. We did, again, add 1/2 tsp xanthan gum to the gf flour, but that was the only thing we changed with the first batch besides using different seeds - instead of fennel or caraway we used Nigella seeds (onion seeds, sometimes called black cumin, or in an Indian grocery, Kalonji). If you've never had Kalonji you should definitely get some, they add a super-delicious savory, slightly oniony flavor to anything you want seeds in, from burgers to curries to any bread ...

Batch number one baked up very pale and kind of weird. They're the super pale ones in the photo below:

For the second batch (same dough), Ellie had the brilliant idea of brushing them with garlic butter instead of salted water, as well as adding some fresh herbs to the topping, and they were a great improvement, though the texture remained odd, though crispy.

That used up all our first batch of dough, but I thought maybe the addition of some other flours might make for a better cracker, so for the whole flour amount in the recipe (1 1/2 c white flour + 1/2 c whole wheat flour = 2 c total) I used equal parts our gluten free flour (2 c rice flour, 2/3 c arrowroot starch, 1/3 c tapioca starch), sorghum flour and ground flax meal, and brushed it with the end of the garlic butter, because garlic makes everything better!

Verdict? Eh. It was ok. I liked the flavor of the different flours but the texture was not hugely improved: