I’ve been hearing a lot about kale chips lately; they were in Bon Appétit, on Serious Eats, heck, my mom even called me to sing their praises. The technique is simple enough: toss stemmed kale leaves with oil, vinegar, salt and pepper and bake in a single layer at 350° for a half hour, until the leaves are crispy, like chips. I am a big fan of roasting vegetables in general and kale has been readily available at the farmers’ market, so this seemed like a great idea.

Having finally made kale chips, I can say they are most definitely not a great idea.  While they are crispy, the leaves are so thin that they don’t crunch in your mouth but instead turn powdery. The initial flavor of the chips is the earthy richness of greens, but the aftertaste is bitter (apparently bitterness is a sign of overcooking, but my kale was not browned). The combination of this bitterness with the powdery texture made any pleasure I might have had at putting the kale into my mouth quickly turn to regret. Contrast this to potato chips, where the end of a mouthful leaves me wanting more delicious potato chips. I have seen kale chips described as “guiltless potato chips”; I can see how that might be true since if you eat one you probably won’t want to eat another. I certainly didn’t.

Like most people my age, I grew up on microwave popcorn. Actually, I have a memory of an air popper with a yellowish-brown plastic top that melted butter and shot popcorn into a bowl, but most of the popcorn eaten in my life has been made in a microwave. Which is amazing because microwave popcorn is really really bad. It is always either burning or leaving half the kernels un-popped, or both. Horrible and frustrating, but it was all I knew.

All I knew until a few months ago, when my life changed. Did you know you can make popcorn on the stove? I don’t mean with one of those exploding foil pans either, but in a pot. It’s as simple as pouring a layer of fat (we usually use olive oil but as long as it’s a lipid it will work) and then covering the bottom of the pan with popcorn kernels. As it happens, the Wedge is an excellent source for local popcorn in Minneapolis. Keeping the pot uncovered, apply high heat. As soon as the popcorn starts to pop, cover the pot and reduce the heat to medium. If you don’t cover the pot, you will soon have popcorn all over your floor. Once the popping slows down significantly, to about one pop every five seconds say, I uncover the pot and reduce the heat to low for another minute or two. At this point all that’s left is to add salt or other flavorings, which I usually do by pouring the popcorn into a large paper sack, adding salt and whatever else, and shaking.

This method has really increased my appreciation of popcorn. For one thing, I have yet to burn a kernel. A burnt kernel of popcorn can turn you off to the whole batch, so this is a major plus. Probably the best thing is being able to control exactly what goes into your popcorn. If you’re concerned about excessive salt, fat or chemicals, making popcorn the old-fashioned way lets you control exactly what goes in rather than being left to the whims of the diabolical Mr. Redenbacher (You only have yourself to blame when you go overboard with lard-popped, bacon-salt corn). This also gives you a lot of room to experiment with flavors. As I mentioned, you can use whatever fat you like, all for different flavor effects: olive oil, butter, lard, bacon grease, suet, other vegetable oils, really anything. For the batch that inspired me to write this post, I used ghee, Indian clarified butter that, at least in the case of my probably too old jar, has a kind of funky, goaty character.

You can play with the fats at the front end of the popcorn process, and then at the back there is an even bigger range of possibilities to be explored with flavorings. Salt is fundamental to all of this, but an obvious variation might be to use the assorted flavored salts, like celery salt or garlic salt. With the garlic salt you might add a little dried dill. Our most recent batch of popcorn involved olive oil and freshly grated parmesan cheese and ground black pepper added at the end. For my popcorn with ghee I decided to embrace Indian flavors and added some garam masala. When adding spices as flavorings always keep in mind that your ability to taste them is wholly dependent on there being enough salt; don’t be shy with the sodium chloride. On the other hand, overly salty popcorn gets fatiguing to the tongue fast; mastering the yin and yang of popcorn salting will probably take a few batches. As Martha reminds me when I get too salt happy, it is easy enough to add more but pretty hard to take it away.

Since starting to make popcorn this way I’ve been eating and enjoying it a lot more. It really doesn’t take much more time than making it in the microwave and the end result is so much better that the two aren’t even comparable. The ability to play with the flavoring offers a lot of entertainment, but even if you were just to go the traditional butter and salt route the sound of popcorn popping around inside your pot is reward enough for any extra effort.

Making crackers is frustrating. In fact, making anything with a rolling pin is pretty damn vexing, but crackers especially so. Good crackers require two things: really thin dough and perfectly uniform dough. The thinness helps make crackers crispy, rather than chewy or, worse, brick-like (tooth-shattering). The uniformity of the dough is related: thin crackers will burn to a cinder while their thick brethren are slowly baking into breadish mediocrity. If there’s any saving grace to bad crackers its that you didn’t spend much time making them, but that’s hardly a consolation.

I am fairly experienced with rolling pins since I make a lot of flattened breads, but  I have never liked using them. It seems like my pin is always getting stuck to the dough, tearing it and ruining my shape. I also find it difficult to roll to a consistent thickness, especially when rolling very thin. I know you can buy little rings to attach to the end of your rolling pin that help control thickness but they sound like more trouble than they’re worth. And why use a rolling pin at all, when we have our friend, Signore Norpro:

Pasta has many of the same requirements as crackers in terms of shaping, so a pasta machine is a natural for making crackers. My working dough recipe is the Lavash Crackers from Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, consisting of:

• 6 3/4 oz AP Flour
• 1/2 t salt
• 1/2 t instant yeast
• 1 T honey (I am just reporting this for accuracy’s sake; I omitted the honey)
• 1 T veg oil
• 3-4 oz water

Very simple. After all, it’s just bread! To make the dough, you proceed as you might imagine, mixing all the ingredients and kneading until the texture is right. Then let the dough rest so the gluten can relax. And you can relax too.

After an hour or less of resting I used my handy-dandy pasta machine to lay down a silkysmooth sheet.

I then divided each sheet into large rectangles then covered them with toppings before sliding them onto my pizza stone in a 400° oven. A lesson I learned with the first batch was that you have to remember to dock the dough (prick it all over with a fork), lest you get this:

Not that puffy crackers are a bad thing, but a one-ply cracker is almost too thin. For the next batches I almost always remembered to dock, whick gave a much more uniformly flat look.

Still pretty big sheets. To actually eat them, I used a knife to break the crackers into chaotic shards. I ended up with quite a few varieties. Here’s a family photo:

Top row from left to right: Vindaloo, Sea Salt, Chili Powder, Aleppo Pepper. Bottom row: seeds,  sesame-soy, garlic-dill.

Besides the lesson about docking above, I learned two things about dealing with toppings. For these crackers I rolled out the dough unflavored and then sprinkled the toppings on before baking. This resulted in toppings that weren’t very well integrated into the dough. In the case of the seeded cracker this meant my carefully placed caraway, poppy, nigella, and sesame seeds almost all rolled off the cracker during the cracking process, never to be tasted and enjoyed. Next time I will try to integrate the flavorings into the dough before rolling.

The other lesson is one about salt: you need a lot of it. Salt is the reason we can taste other flavors; in this batch of crackers the most flavorful ones were dill-garlic, loaded with garlic salt, and the soy sesame, soy sauce having plenty of sodium. The vindaloo and chili-pepper crackers had very subtle flavors since I failed to add salt with the spices.

I am excited to make crackers again. The pasta machine really took the effort out of rolling them, and they can be thrown together very quickly as a result of not really needing to rise. I have a lot of ideas for other flavorings to try, especially if the flavorings can be integrated into the dough. I also want to play with other flours and incorporate some whole grains.