Print the recipe card! whole wheat crackers
This recipe is going to get you using up your wheat in a hurry! You can make these crackers a hundred different ways (depending on how you decide to season them), any way you make them they’ll disappear fast. My kids just love these crackers!
This recipe comes from Allrecipes, where you’ll find lots of ideas in the comments section of other ways these crackers have been seasoned. Today I made a cheese cracker variety out of them and (my favorite) rosemary and garlic. They’re easy to make and yummy to snack on!
Yield: It depends on how thin you roll out the dough. The crackers here (which I prefer crispy, so they’re rolled out thin) makes 4-5 cookie sheets worth of crackers.
Prep time: 20- 30 minutes
Ingredients:
1 3/4 cups whole wheat flour
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
3/4 tsp. salt
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 cup water
seasonings as desired, salt for sprinkling
Instructions:
Heat oven to 350 degrees. In a mixing bowl, stir together both flours and the salt. Pour in the vegetable oil and water and mix just until blended. Knead seasonings into the dough as desired. Roll out the dough as thin as possible — no thicker than 1/8th of an inch. Place dough on an ungreased baking sheet. Cut into crackers using a pastry wheel (or a pizza cutter), prick with a fork and spritz with oil (optional). Sprinkle with course salt and bake for 10 – 13 minutes (for very thinly rolled crackers ) until crisp and lightly brown. Baking time will be increased if crackers are rolled more thick. When cool, remove from baking sheet and separate into individual crackers.
Mix the dough together
I divided this batch in half. The first half I seasoned with rosemary (which I crushed) and garlic powder.
Just knead the seasonings right into the dough.
Once again, the pasta maker comes to the rescue and presses the dough lickety split! I like these crackers really thin … using the pasta maker that translates to a #5 on the press gauge.
Here’s the second half of the dough. For this batch I seasoned using parmesan cheese and cheddar cheese powder.
After laying out the dough on a cookie sheet, cut into crackers using either a pastry wheel or a pizza cutter. Using a knife takes a lot more time but you could do that too.
As you can see, I’m not especially careful when it comes to laying down the dough. It’s kind of like a patch work quilt, so long as all the dough has a place to be. Feel free to cut your crackers into circles or any other shape you want — this is the quickest way I’ve found to do it. For how long these crackers seem to last at our house I haven’t found a reason to complicate it.
Prick the dough and barely spritz with oil. The oil is optional, although it does seem to help the coarse salt to stick on the crackers better.
Finish by sprinkling salt over the crackers and put into the oven to bake. The cheese variety is going to bake more quickly (due to the fats in the cheese) so keep a close eye on them after 10 minutes — they’ll burn quickly. Varieties with just plain seasonings are finished baking (depending on thickness) between 13-15 minutes.
Out of the oven…
Ready to enjoy!
Store the leftovers for later using a ziploc bag.
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I actually have yet to try these, but I linked up to them on my site today as they look fabulous and my kids would not survive w/o crackers. I’ve got to learn to make them. I will be trying these this week! Thanks Megan!
That’s great Misty! Funny timing here — you’ll have to be sure to try the saltine crackers I’m posting tonight too! Another totally recipe that makes a lot of crackers to keep up with the kids!
I have tried crackers in the past and the process seemed to take forever, so I would purchase boxed crackers on sale and with coupons. I am going to try your recipe because it looks so simple. A pasta roller!!!! I got one a couple of months ago and now I have another use for it. You are amazing and I can’t wait to play with this recipe!!
I forgot to ask what is the gadget you are using to prick the crackers? That looks like a fun thing to have!!
Definitely! Using a pasta roller makes it really easy to get evenly thin crisp crackers (or not so thin, depending on how you like it!). And yes, there’s so much you can do with a basic cracker recipe like this — I especially like the additional ideas given at the top of the comments here!
The pricking tool is called a dough docker (I had to look that one up!). Here’s a link to find one online if your local kitchen store doesn’t have it. I passed up buying it for a while because I thought it was something I didn’t really need but I’ve found I use it a lot (esp. for pizza dough and making crackers) so I’m happy I bought one after all.
Holy Smokes. That link to the dough docker is a company that charges $12+ for shipping. Amazon has a similar product with better shipping deals.
Thanks for the heads up!
oh yeah, and I’ve found this is one recipe where using honey as a sweetener doesn’t work very well. You can spritz the crackers with a very dilute honey/water mixture for a little sweetness, but the thin crackers turned into scorched charcoal briquettes when I added honey to the dough before rolling out.
Thank you, thank you! I appreciate all your experience and ideas! Besides the animal crackers I can’t wait to try out the thin mint idea you mentioned!
I use this recipe as the base for the animal crackers, but add about 1/4 tsp of vanilla and/or almond extract (or ground vanilla bean – fancy!!), 1/2 tsp of ground ginger and/or nutmeg, dust the dough with icing sugar, and sprinkle the tops with rock sugar. They’re a little crispier than normal animal crackers, but the flavor is pretty close. I add ginger because animal crackers are normally what I nibble for upset tummy, but I think they’d be pretty tasty with any of the apple/pumpkin pie spices.
And you can also make a pretty decent fake Girl Scout “Thin Mint” cookie with this recipe, adding about 1/4 tsp of mint extract and then dipping the baked crackers in chocolate fudge sauce.
Note: I don’t actually measure most seasonings, so I’m rough estimating here. It’s all dashes, pinches and splashes in my kitchen; you might want to start light and tweak my estimates to match your tastes.
I love crackers, but they can get expensive and I always seems to run out when I needed them. So I love being able to make my own so easily in the flavors I like. Since they don’t need a super-hot oven, I’ll normally make up a batch to run through the oven after baking something else before it cools down.
You can get passable “Chicken in a Biscuit” by adding chicken bouillon and brushing the tops with melted butter instead of spritzing with oil. For awesome veggie crackers, try grinding dehydrated veggies and dusting the tops of the crackers with tomato powder.
If you’re tired of the simple squares, or you just want to have a little fun, you can get easy discs by rolling the dough out into logs, partially freezing it, and then slicing it with a mandolin veggie slicer. I made cheese fish and animal cracker “molds” by gluing mini cookie cutters to an old sheet pan, just line them up over the rolled out dough and press. You can find a staggering variety of shapes and the mini-cutters often come in affordable bulk collections. Any scrap bits from between shapes make excellent additions to party mix or in lieu of croutons in soup and salads.
Great ideas — thanks! Do you happen to add anything different to a basic recipe like this when you make your animal crackers? I can get away with seasonings, etc. no problem using this recipe (and I’m excited to try the Chicken in a Biscuit/ veggie cracker ideas you mentioned esp. :)) but animal crackers haven’t gotten past the “bland” yet.