Sourdough Crackers

So this was my first experience in making crackers. You can find the original recipe from the King Arthur Flour website.

If you’re very very observant (or, more so that I was) you might notice that my ingredients above are slightly *different* than what is showing on the King Arthur website.

Yup. I totally biffed it. I must have read too fast, because what I used was King Arthur All-purpose flour, rather than the whole wheat flour their recipe calls for.

Given how badly I messed up the recipe, they turned out surprisingly good!

In a normal circumstance, I would recommend you weigh out flour and wet ingredients when making a bread-ish style recipe.

I used 113 g AP flour.

Although I guess in this case the use of a completely different flour would have had much more of an impact on the final product than being off a couple of grams.

Here, I used 248 g of sourdough starter. Given that there is some variability in how wet a sourdough starter would be, that’s going to change things up a bit as well. I then mixed in a bowl 1/2 stick of butter (4 T.), 1/2 t salt, and 2 T of rosemary. Next time I will back off just a bit on the rosemary because it was a bit strong.

Using the wrong flour definitely explains why the dough was so wet, but it was still pretty easy to work with.

Shape into 2 rectangles, and chill for at least 1/2 hour. If you want to go longer, I think it would help develop more flavor.

After chilling, lay out a sheet of WELL FLOURED parchment paper and roll out the dough using a WELL FLOURED rolling pin. My stuck like crazy but I can totally see this may have been due to using AP flour.

It’s kind of hard to get it into an exact rectangle. Mine looked more like…hmm, Montana?

Prick holes with a fork.

Close up of holes.

Spray or baste with olive oil. I found that spraying the very, very lightly basting with the brush worked, but you can see from the disarray here that you have to be very careful because the crackers go all over the place when you do that. Sprinkle with coarse salt and cut. A pizza cutter worked very well for this.

Slide that baby on the cookie sheet

And bake until crispy. The original recipe called for baking at 350 for 22 minutes (changing racks and rotating halfway through). I found I needed almost 40 minute (I just kept checking them every 5 minutes), but I’m sure that’s due to how wet they were. Next time, if I use AP flour, I will cook them at 375 (convection) and they’ll probably be done in closer to 28 minutes, but I’ll be checking for sure.

They really tasted quite good. I’m going to try them with whole wheat and sesame seeds next time. Definitely worth the effort! (update at bottom: they’re even better with whole wheat flour!)

Delicious with marinated cheese!

I did remake these (following the directions this time!) with whole wheat flour, 2 tablespoons of sesame seeds, and 1 teaspoon of onion powder. I thought it was too oniony, but after they baked the onion was perfect! Next time I’ll go 3 tablespoons of sesame seeds because they were awesome.

Served with Humboldt Fog and avocado honey.