Martha+Tom

Pasta Machine? More like cracker machine

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:

Machines are taking over

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.

LIKE BUTTA

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:

This is why you dock!

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.

img_5159

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:

All Crackers

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.

10 comments | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

«   »

10 comments on “Pasta Machine? More like cracker machine”

  1. Martha 14 March, 2009 at 8:57 am

    These look really yummy. I am bummed that I was not there for this as I enjoy applying the spices, seeds, etc. to the dough. Also, make more! I feel I did not have my fair share.

  2. Tom 14 March, 2009 at 10:03 am

    Let’s make some together when we have some time off together. You know, when we have time off together…

  3. Uncle Don 14 March, 2009 at 12:21 pm

    A heck of a way to communicate!

    What does it mean “to dock”?

  4. Tom 14 March, 2009 at 12:33 pm

    Docking is poking little holes in dough so it doesn’t puff up. I am not sure why this happens, probably because poking the holes attaches the top of the dough to the bottom and makes them not want to separate. You can see in the first baked cracker picture the dough puffed like crazy, but in the second batch the puffing is much less and more controlled, thanks to docking with a fork. There are also specialized bread stamps and rolling pins for docking.

  5. Amy 18 March, 2009 at 4:38 pm

    Tom. do you think you could make the soy-sesame crackers here at home when you come. those sound really tasty. You could probably make a facsimile of those crackers that Linda gave me a box of? That would be wonderful. They had lots of additions that would have to be worked into the dough, I’m sure. Yum.

  6. Tom 18 March, 2009 at 9:04 pm

    Yeah the sesame-soy ones are definitely repeatable. Are you talking about Susie’s Flatbread’s? This cracker dough was pretty close and my seeded crackers would have been REALLY close if not for all the seeds falling off. I have some ideas for remedying that next time though.

  7. Caroline 11 February, 2012 at 7:12 am

    Is it possible to use other cracker recipes using a pasta machine, I mean, a yeast-free recipe? I would think so as pasta does not have yeast in it, right?

  8. Doug 8 January, 2018 at 5:47 pm

    Hi Tom:

    I am curious what pasta machine you used. We make a flaxseed cracker cone in dehyrdrators and we are hoping to find a good machine that can handle high moisture content 45-60%. We don’t use flour. Usually, pasta machines require 30% moisture. Anyway, I hope to hear from you.

    Warmly, Doug

  9. Ed 25 January, 2023 at 6:54 am

    Brush the cracker lightly with water before adding seeds and toppings to make them stick. The water wash will actually make the crackers cook up more crispy.

    Posts linking to this post

  1. MARTHAANDTOM » Scrabble CHEEZ-IT: have your fun and eat it too. 29 May, 2009 at 3:53 pm

    […] buy a lot of boxed or bagged snacks aside from tortilla chips. Tom, of course, loves to make his own crackers. So why the draw? They’re not local, they’re not good for you… blah blah blah. […]

Leave a Reply