February has been a crazy month, with various events prompting me to look more into preparing various food stuffs from scratch rather than buying them from the store. I started with bread last month, finally getting to the point this month where they don’t deflate like a spent balloon in the oven. For those bread loaves less than perfect, I found a use for them as breading for home made stuffing mix. Waste not, want not, as they say. Finally satisfied with the results, I decided to move onto home made saltine crackers.
I’ve been making soup for quite some time now, but what’s soup without a few crackers? I went to the following website: https://www.servedfromscratch.com/saltines-from-scratch/. I used cake flour and since I didn’t have any vegetable oil, I substituted lard. The resulting dough was difficult to work with, especially after leaving it in the fridge overnight like the web-site suggested. Using a rolling pin just didn’t get it as flat as it looked in the pictures, never mind getting the nice, neat squares she showed. After baking them in the oven, this is what I wound up with. Those little suckers would just not compress.
Hmmm, definitely not nice flat crackers! However, they did taste like saltines, and were actually quite good, so I figured I was headed in the right direction. It’s possible the measurements given weren’t quite accurate or maybe using lard instead of oil affected it.
So, I tried a different recipe. This one is from Homemade Saltine Crackers – The Mountain Kitchen . It has fewer ingredients, uses unbleached flour instead of cake flour and doesn’t have the overnight resting time in the fridge which the previous recipe suggested. One ingredient was 7 tablespoons of water, but I found I needed to add a few extra tablespoons to make the dough more workable. The dough ball flattened out much better under the rolling pin. After cutting out roughly square shapes and using a fork to make the classic indents, I basted them with butter and added Celtic Sea salt to the tops. After baking, I achieved the result below.
This effort was much better and had a good flavor. I may experiment with a few more variations before settling on a favorite. Since I only use crackers intermittently, I had run into the problem with store-bought crackers going stale before I used them up. Home baking allows me to make small batches as needed. I haven’t tried assessing the cost of making these but I’m sure it’s more economical than buying the store brand and ending up wasting some because I didn’t use them up quick enough.
Hope this inspires any readers to make their own stab at home cooking.
Have a safe and happy March.
