Crackers

It’s the usual conundrum. You want a salty snack but don’t want to eat junk. Or maybe you’re not in the mood for a meal at dinnertime; you really just want crackers. Here, that means basically saltines. Even back home, it’s tough to find crackers that you feel good about eating—that nourish your body, not just fill your gut with white flour. Wouldn’t it be great to find crackers that you can munch on and get your nutritional needs met? Or grab some for a plane ride rather than trying to deal with airport food? And kids? Don’t we little humans come out naturally liking crackers?

The most excellent news is that you can make your own crackers at home very easily, from any kind of ingredients you want. Beans, tofu, garbanzo flour, oats—whatever you want. Gluten-free, no problem. Hi-protein, done. Hidden veggies for the kids? We’ve got you covered. Crackers are fast, easy, delicious, nutritious, highly transportable, and easily kid-friendly.

The Cracker Strategy

Before we talk about how to construct the perfect cracker for your own personal delights, let’s deconstruct the cracker so we know what we’re working with.

Like all baked items, crackers need ingredients from certain specific categories so that they’ll behave like we want them to once we cook them. We are making a dough. That means we are combining wet items with dry items. We need the following:

• Base ingredient(s) (may be wet or dry)
• Tablespoon ground flax in water as binder
• Liquid if working with dry base
• Fat. Helps bind to limit crumbling and helps the crackers not taste dry.
• Grain
• Rising agent. Otherwise they’re just hard little pucks.
• Salt
• Flavorings

This list is actually the fundamentals for all things you’ll want to bake. Let’s see how this works for crackers.

Cracker Construction

Base Ingredients

You can use any legume or grain as a base. Legumes may be wet, such as tofu, a bowl of beans, or bowl of sprouted lentils. They may also be dry, meaning any kind of flour or even whole rolled oats. Use any combination for any nutrient goals you may have.
Wet items will need to be crushed. Tofu and soft beans may be mashed, but otherwise use a blender on low. They don’t need to be completely smooth but they can if you prefer.

Ground Flax

Mix a tablespoon of ground flax with a tablespoon water and let set 5 minutes. It’ll gel up and make a nice binder.

Liquids & Veggies

Here is where you can sneak in some vegetables. Puree whatever veggies you want or use a lower blender setting and leave them in tiny chunks. Zucchini has a lot of water while carrots do not. Spinach, you can’t even tell is there except the color. Peppers add a bit of flavoring. Add spicy peppers if you dare. Also consider something zesty like kimchi or sauerkraut.

You can also just add water or vegetable stock.

If you’re working with a base that’s already wet, like tofu or beans, you won’t need to add any more liquids. You can, of course, add as many veggies as you want. The wetter your mixture, the more flour you will need, so keep that in mind. Sometimes intended small batches get very big very fast when a lot of flour needs to be added to soak up the liquid.

Some Fat

Coconut oil, olive oil, ripe avocado, or nut butter. Your recipe; you choose the quantity.

Some Grain

It’s great to experiment with any kind of flour desired for this ingredient. Whole rolled oats also work well. About one-third-to-one-quarter of the overall mixture should be a grain. If you want to make the crackers grain-free, use a legume flour instead. Better results tend to come with including a grain or grain flour. You need to add enough of this to make your dough easy to handle without it sticking to everything.

Rising Agent

Baking soda or baking powder. About a half-teaspoon.

Flavorings

Salt is the most important flavoring, so it gets its own ingredients line. About a half-to-full teaspoon.

Whether or not you want to eat your crackers all comes down to your flavorings. Use strong flavorings, and a lot of them. Err more on the side of overdoing the flavorings than underdoing them.

Rosemary and fennel are both excellent choices. Both are strong flavors and very nice in a cracker.

Other ideas: miso paste, veggie stock/cube, soy sauce, Bragg’s aminos, mustard (powder), vermouth, and/or your favorite spice blend. Brine of pickles, sauerkraut, olives, capers. Dehydrated onion, powdered garlic and onion, chili powder, ground pepper. And anything else with flavor.

Also consider adding chopped nuts and seeds: almond, hazelnut, walnut; chia, flax, hemp, sesame—whatever you like in a cracker and whichever nutrients you’re targeting.

Bake

After mixing well, with a fork is fine, grab about a teaspoon or tablespoon of dough, pat it down as flat as you can, maybe dip it in some toppings, and lay it onto the sheet. You might also refrigerate the dough for a couple hours and roll it out, then cut your crackers. Or, you can roll up the dough fat, like a biscuit tube, and slice off rounds. Toppings are always nice: dehydrated onion, chia, sesame…

Bake at 350F until dark brown and crispy. Air-frying also works well. If you want them as a raw food, use a food dehydrator (may not get crunchy).

Be sure to cook until completely crispy. The color needs to turn darker. Any remaining softness means moisture. If totally done, they will stay crunchy and fresh in a sealed bag easily long enough for you to eat them. They won’t last long!

Enjoy!

Taking charge of your snacking in this way is tremendously self-satisfying. It’s also a wonderful expression of self-love. Not to mention how easy it is to open up new meal possibilities, especially while travelling, and impress all your friends with your delicious ingenuity!

Experiment with small batches. What do you like best?

Dr. Michele Poff is a professional writer, editor, instructional designer and qualitative researcher, working primarily in formal spaces and healing sciences. She hosts well-being tours in the Brazilian Amazon, paradisefoundretreat.com. Her latest endeavor, The Alignment Portal website, thealignmentportal.com, hosts materials to help people find and follow their life purpose, aiming at fulfilling their life potential. She lives on the Central Coast and gets a lot of great thinking done in the jungle.