I wanted to do something with my sourdough starter last weekend, so I decided to make Whole Wheat Sourdough Crackers (link no longer works). This is one of the quickest recipes using sourdough starter that I’ve made so far. There’s no rising time.
I mixed together a dough of starter, whole wheat flour, salt, baking soda, and margarine (which I used since I didn’t have lard or coconut oil, which the recipe called for). I didn’t have to use any extra flour beyond the cup that the recipe called for. After it rested for 10 minutes, I rolled it out.
This is where I didn’t follow the recipe exactly. The recipe says to roll out about a quarter cup of dough, cut into crackers, transfer to baking sheet, and repeat until baking sheet is filled with crackers. I’d read a few other variations on this recipe that involved rolling out directly on Silpat and cutting and baking the crackers directly from there, so that you wouldn’t have to deal with moving fragile crackers. I’d be afraid of cutting the Silpat and ruining it, but I decided that the most expedient thing to do would be to roll out the dough on parchment paper so I could cut the crackers and bake them without having to transfer them from one place to another.
Last weekend, much like our weather all year, was unseasonably warm – late October with 80-degree temperatures – so I didn’t want to have my oven on too long. I decided to do was to roll out about half of the dough on one sheet of parchment paper. That way, I’d only have 2 baking sheets of crackers which I’d be able to have in the oven at once.
I tried to roll the dough out as thinly as possible. Alton Brown’s wheat cracker recipe says to roll out to 1/16 inch, so that was what I had in mind, but I didn’t try to measure the crackers. I brushed the dough with oil and sprinkled it with salt, cut the dough into squares with a pizza cutter, and moved the parchment paper to a baking sheet. I forget if I baked them for 15 or 20 minutes.
We liked these. I got way too much salt on most of them, unfortunately, but the ones that didn’t have much salt tasted a lot like Wheat Thins. Alex said that the ones that I made were thicker than Wheat Thins, which I was afraid of – I definitely had uneven thickness in some places. I probably didn’t bake them enough to get them evenly crisp as well. They were good, though.
I liked making this recipe. It was quick and easy to put together. I’ll probably make this again. I also want to make Alton Brown’s wheat cracker recipe at some point in the future so I can compare the two recipes. When I make this again, I may try using vegetable oil or olive oil for the fat, to see how that turns out. I’ll probably roll out about a quarter of the dough on each parchment paper sheet to try to get them even thinner and crisper. This was a pretty simple and fast recipe to make – I think it only took me about an hour at most from start to finish, and that includes baking time. I recommend this, if you’ve got sourdough starter to use up but want something fast to make
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