Cheese Crackers

A stack of crackers

I’ve been wanting to try my hand at crackers for a while now and I finally got around to making some yesterday. I had some Gouda cheese left over from a recipe that I’d tried a few days back. I decided to make some cheese crackers. All I needed was a good recipe. As always, I turned to the Internet for help and was inspired by what I saw in a couple of places.

Ingredients:
(For 20 small and 10 medium crackers)
2 tightly packed cups of freshly grated Gouda cheese (I used this)
1 cup all-purpose flour
3 Tbsp unsalted butter (cold), cut up into small pieces
Salt
Pepper
Approximately 3 Tbsp cold buttermilk

Method:
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with foil. (I started out using parchment paper for baking the crackers, but halfway through the process, it started to smell like something was starting to burn inside the oven, so I replaced the parchment paper with aluminium foil. I don’t know if the parchment paper that I used was of poor quality.)

Put flour, salt, pepper, shredded cheese and butter in bowl of a food processor. Pulse until flour, butter, and cheese are combined. Add buttermilk and continue to pulse, scraping down the sides of the bowl. Keep adding buttermilk, 1 teaspoon at a time, until the mixture comes together to form a dough.

Divide the dough into as many balls as you want to make crackers (many small ones or a few bigger ones), place on a foil-lined baking sheet and bake till golden brown.

I was making the crackers in 2 batches, so I divided the dough into 2 portions: I used one portion to make small crackers (I got 20 crackers from this) and the other to make bigger, slightly chewier ones (the yield here was 10 crackers).

For the first batch, I rolled out the dough between sheets of parchment paper and then poked the surface several times with a fork. I then used a drinking glass with a small diameter (since I do not have cookie cutters) to make about two dozen small discs.
For the second batch of crackers, I made small 1-inch balls of the dough, placed them on parchment paper, and then flattened the balls with my hand (you could use the bottom of a drinking glass instead to get uniform thickness). I then pricked each circle several times with a fork.

Bake at 350 degrees F for 12-20 minutes (depending on size and thickness of cracker) until very lightly browned around the edges. Remove to a wire rack and cool.



Cheese crackers for My Favorite Things: Cheese.