Friday, January 7, 2011

Rosemary Crackers


I know you are going to think I am crazy, who makes crackers when you can just pick up a box at the store. Well I have this strange little addiction to making things that you could normally just buy. I love challenging myself and realizing that you can make something great that doesn't come out of a box. Chris has been in a bread frenzy, he has become a little addicted to making bread, hopefully he posts something about his bread soon ;) Around the holidays our cheese drawer in the refrigerator became packed full. I love having cheese with crackers...yum yum. I could eat that for dinner and I think I did a few nights this week. This post is lacking pictures, cause we were multi- tasking in the kitchen that night, I was making Curried Cauliflower, which I will post soon. Enough rambling and onto the delicious Crackers.

Recipe
1 3/4 cups flour
1 tablespoon dried rosemary- crumble it up before adding in.
1 teaspoon baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup water
1/3 cup olive oil
chunky salt- for topping

Heat your oven to 350 degrees. If you have a pizza stone place that in the middle rack. Don't worry if you don't have one, you can easily bake the crackers on a baking sheet.

Mix together flour, rosemary, baking powder and salt. Make a hole in the middle of the dry ingredients, add the water and olive oil. Work the dough into a ball. I tend to knead it in the bowl, you can do this on a floured surface as well.

Divide the dough into 3 or 4 balls. Roll each ball out on parchment paper. You want to get the dough pretty thin. about 1/8 of an inch. Make sure to keep lifting it off the parchment and adding flour if you need to. You can try different thickness with the batches.

Once the crackers are rolled out, use a pizza wheel to cut them into squares, rectangles or whatever shape you would like. Next you need to poke holes in the top with a fork. If you don't do this the crackers will get very puffy! We forgot for one batch and we had PUFFY crackers.

Now it is time to add salt, lightly push it into the dough.

Bake on the parchment. If using a pizza stone, just place the parchment onto the stone. If using a baking sheet, place parchment on sheet and put into the oven.

Bake for about 10 minutes, but you need to rotate them about every 2-3 minutes. Keep a watchful eye on them, we burned a batch cause we turned our eye for a minute.

Hopefully you will end up with great crackers. I plan to make a big batch this weekend and keep them in the pantry, if I can keep my hands off of them!