For this weekend culinary challenge, I tried something a little bit different: homemade nuts, seeds, and dried fruits crackers.
As you may know, I don’t have a sweet tooth. Therefore, for my late night snacks, I usually turn to salty treats like popcorn and chips. Crackers felt like a healthier version of these snacks. For that week’s menu, I also planned to complement a meal of beef and barley soup with cheese and crackers.
The most convincing point, however, was the look of these crackers. I mean, look:
They look so delicious! I had to give them a try (and a taste).
According to its author, this recipe is inspired by the raincoast crisps you can find at the grocery store. You know these ones:
If you can find such crackers at the store, why should you bother making them at home?
The price, people, the price! These crackers are a bit expensive, but they aren’t when you do them yourself. You can even buy the ingredients in bulk to cut cost.
Plus, when you do them at home, you can pick and choose everything you put in them. You can custom them to your taste. For example, I hate raisins. So, instead of being poisoned by such vile dried fruit, I used cranberries and lived happily ever after.
Moreover, it isn’t as complicated as it looks. The recipe is quite simple in fact. Firstly, you cook something that resembles a cake. Then, you freeze it, slice it and put the slices in the oven to make them crispy. The end.
Are you convinced? If you are, you will find the recipe on the following page of the Girl versus Dough website.
The result
The first step, as I said, was to make what seemed to me like a cake mixture. I did exactly as the recipe said with the exceptions of raisins. Instead, I used a mix of dried cranberries and apricots for the dried fruits. For the nuts and seeds, I used equal parts pumpkin seeds, sunflowers seeds, whole cashews and cut almonds.
Next time: I will double the quantity of sea salt and use a whole teaspoon. Half a teaspoon was fine, but I could use a little more. I like salt.
The cooking part went fine. I made sure the loaf wasn’t stock to the bottom of the pan before freezing it.
The slicing was fine too. I tried to be as consistent as possible with the thickness of the slices to avoid problems with the second cooking. It wasn’t perfect, but that’s okay.
The final step of the recipe is cooking the slices for 15 to 20 minutes. If you know your oven runs high, lower the temperature just a bit. Since I didn’t follow this advice, some of my crackers were a bit overcooked (not too say burnt). However, most of them were fine.
In the end, the result was very tasty and crispy. I will definitively do crackers again.
Little tip: For the crackers to remain crispy, you need to let them completely cool before putting them in a container. And never put them in the fridge! Humidity is not your friend.
For a potluck, I definitively see myself bringing these crisps along with herbed cheese balls (recipe here).
Have a great day 🙂
