This post is a work in progress and is promising. Depicted here is a pictorial path to the crackers and my thoughts on future plans. I post this early in hopes of others jumping in with experiments of their own.
I ground 135 grams of spelt berries using the fine setting on a coffee mill (these are abundant at thrift stores, do a dry cleaning with a sacrificial batch of grain, any grain, to remove residual coffee).
Even on fine, the ground "flour" will be pretty coarse. Here you can see the husks as well as the insides, we're going to use it all.
To this grain I added water (92 g), salt (3 g), vegetable oil (20 g), baking powder (1.5 t) and mixed it up. It's a coarse slop.
I plopped this on a piece of parchment paper, placed a piece of plastic wrap on it and gently rolled it out to something like a 15" diameter circle. The plastic was then removed to leave this.
These were baked at 375°F until an edge just started to burn, about 15 minutes. They were removed from the oven, cut with a pizza cutter while still warm and allowed to cool.
In my experience, any cracker's flavor evolves for hours after they finish baking. Their flavor is indescribable and, to my surprise, good! Not great, but that's where the development comes in.
What's next?
1. fats? Not a big fan of butter in most breads, I like vegetable oil in breads because of the texture it creates and the neutral flavor. Other fats might be good... lard? suet?
2. preferment? Why not preferment the grain flour to develop some sugar and flavor and then, just before baking, give it a shot of b powder to get the biscuit/cracker-like crisp.
3. grain? I only had spelt on hand. The original thought was for wheat berries. There are lots of options here for fun mixtures, etc.
Let me know of any ideas you all have and share in the comments.
I attempted some crackers just recently. They turned out ok, nothing amazing, but then again, they're crackers. Mine ended up as wheat thicks rather than wheat thins. Next time I'll try to roll them out thinner more evenly.
ReplyDeleteCracker Photo
I am experimenting with crackers this winter too. So far, I've been baking up published recipes, thus far with butter fat (lots of it) that end up like delicious bits of pie crust. Lovely taste and dead simple to make but I am hoping to develop something healthier for the family. I've been scouring store cracker box ingredients and most do include yeast and baking soda or powder...
ReplyDeleteAlex, those look pretty nice!
ReplyDeleteRachel, I bet butter is a nice flavor and texture, I saw a rinehart recipe recently for a Ritz cracker knockoff, looked good. For super grainy, I wanted to try to have the grain taste come through more, hence the neutral oil addn. Good to know about the ingrdientlabels you noticed, I'll have to start reading some. I've had another batch of slept and water fermenting in the fridge about two days now. That "dough" should make an interesting cracker when I get to it.