Our July 2012 Daring Bakers’ Host was Dana McFarland and she challenged us to make homemade crackers! Dana showed us some techniques for making crackers and encouraged to use our creativity to make each cracker our own by using ingredients we love.
Dana gave us several recipes for Crackers and they all looked so good I decided to try all four of them. I served them at my son's fifth birthday party / picnic and they were a big hit. It seems like if you tell most people you are making crackers they assume is is something hard - well that could not be further from the truth. I just made a half batch of each of these and they were all very easy to put together. In the picture they are from front and clockwise: 1-Cheddar, Rosemary, and Walnut Icebox Crackers, 2-Pepper Jack and Oregano Crackers, 3-Health Crackers, and 4-Seedy Crisps. I'll just leave you with a few comments on each:
Health Crackers - I used some wheat bran instead of the wheat germ that was called for. These were hand rolled and I just cut them with a pizza cutter to make nice little squares. Except for the fact that I salted them a little too much these were very good crackers and they looked like "real crackers" as well.
Seedy Crisps - Another good one and probably could be called a health cracker too. I used the pasta maker to roll these because I wanted to try that but it is not really necessary. Pasta dough is very stiff and hard to get thin; this is not the case with these cracker doughs. The pasta roller did make them nice and thin and uniform though and I thought these also came out very nice looking.
Pepper Jack and Oregano Crackers - enough of the healthy stuff. I decided to make this recipe with the pasta roller as well and it was probably a mistake. The dough was very wet and it would stretch and break a lot in the pasta roller. I think maybe because of this the dough became a little over-worked and the crackers were not quite as delicate as I would have liked. Even with that these were my favorite for flavor and they almost looked like a real ritz type cracker.
Cheddar, Rosemary, and Walnut Icebox Crackers - The last type of cracker was a refrigerator cracker. You just create a log with the dough and slice them off - very simple, very easy. These weren't really the best looking and they crumbled a lot when eating them but they tasted good. Nice and buttery and the flavor of rosemary and walnuts was very good.
If you want to try making your own crackers check out the recipes at the Daring Kitchen Recipe Archive.