Fiona Weir is Starts at 60’s resident cook, sharing a new recipe every Tuesday. She is based in Gerringong on the NSW South Coast and runs hands-on cooking workshops from her family’s Buena Vista Farm.
Crackers! A flat, dry baked biscuit traditionally made with flour. Sometimes presented as a nutritious and convenient way to consume good grains. An excellent vehicle for cheese. The modern cracker is similar to nautical ship’s biscuits, military hardtack, and sacramental bread, inexpensive and long-lasting.
Crackers were historically used for sustenance in the absence of perishable foods on long sea voyages, land migrations, and military campaigns, none of which are really relevant to you and I, but still, we love crackers. These days they are no longer a basic long-lasting food staple, are often covered in chemicals and have come a very long way from their origin. They’re cheap, and not something people typically or casually make, because the time it takes to make them and clean up is hardly worth the $3 that the supermarket version costs? Right?
Why you should make your own crackers!
Freshness! Bespokeness! Creativity! Be a creator, not just a consumer. At the heart of it, crackers are so simple, basically just four ingredients; flour, water, oil, salt, with no chemicals, fake flavours or emulsifiers necessary. And what about all that cracker packaging? Box, plastic wrap, tray, there is so much waste associated with the supermarket version. We can cut that out by buying ingredients in bulk and making them ourselves. They’re super quick to make. They last for ages in a sealed container (please refer to earlier discussion about sea biscuits!) But the biggest consideration? Avoiding ultra-processed foods.
Avoiding ultra-processed supermarket crackers
An ultra-processed food is an industrially formulated edible substance derived from natural food or synthesised from other compounds. Most supermarket crackers fall into this category. They are designed to be highly profitable for the manufacturer, convenient, and hyperpalatable, often through food additives and preservatives. They have undergone significant levels of processing to make them as cheap as possible to produce which inevitably decreases their nutritional value. Food scientists are establishing links between ultra-processed foods and cancer, heart disease and obesity. So if the health implications aren’t enough to sway you, how about homemade tastes so much better?
These are the quickest, simplest and most customisable cracker ever. I costed them out this week and even with Australian Olive Oil at record prices they are still less than $3 per batch, using premium flour and nice salt. This is the cracker that just might make you completely evangelical about home-made food over store-bought. It’s quick to make, actually cheaper per kilogram than store bought, there’s minimal packaging, better nutrition, and they are exponentially fresher and tastier. They are genuinely easy to make because they have, as I said, four ingredients.
I’ve always hoped that these crackers were not just crackers but a hook. The gateway from-scratch recipe. The thing that most people buy and that once they start to make, never go back. The canary in the goldmine of home food prep: if people are making their own crackers we know that the tide of supermarket stranglehold over home food production is over. Ultra-processed, nutritionally void and industrialised food DOES NOT WIN.
Can a cracker really be all those things? Why not?
Recipe
Makes approx. 20 crackers
Ingredients
300 g (2 cups) plain or bread/bakers flour
125 ml (1/2 cup) water
185 ml (3/4 cup) olive oil
2 teaspoons sea salt
herbs and/or seeds, to taste, such as finely chopped rosemary
Method
Preheat your oven to 180°C (350°F) (170°C/340°F fan-forced) and find two baking trays.
Put all the ingredients together in a bowl and mix well until it resembles dough, bound together.
Note: if the dough feels oily or wet, add flour one tablespoon at a time until it binds together.
Divide the dough into two balls and roll one ball of dough between two sheets of baking paper until it’s thin (2-3 mm), or use a pasta maker for this job, if you have one.
Remove the top sheet of baking paper and cut the dough into squares or strips with a sharp knife or pizza cutter (I use a ridged ravioli cutter). Lift the whole sheet of paper onto the first baking tray.
Repeat with the other dough ball so you’ve got two trays of rolled out and cut crackers.
Bake for 12-14 minutes, or until crisp and pale golden. Allow them to cool on the trays before transferring to an airtight container.
These crackers stay fresh for about 4 weeks. At least. Long enough for a sea journey. No nasties. Take THAT ultra processed crackers.