If you’ve been on the fence about getting a pasta roller — either an attachment for your stand mixer or a hand-cranked one for your biceps — I may be able to offer the justification you were hoping for: a pasta roller proves handy for homemade crackers, too.
You see, to make good crackers, you need to roll the dough out thinly, for optimal snap, and evenly, so that they’ll bake in a uniform fashion, without doughy or burnt spots.
And as I learned from my talented friends at Hidden Kitchen (see their blog), a pasta roller is the ideal tool to achieve that. You’ll use the first roller only, the one that’s just two cylinders facing each other and rolling inward, and switch from narrow to narrower, exactly like you would for pasta, until you have a super thin strip of dough, ready to be baked.
It’s also a kitchen activity that ranks high on the fun-o-meter: rolling pasta or cracker dough never fails to remind me of my play-doh days, and I could spend all afternoon doing just that.
My cracker recipe is quite simple: regular flour and semolina flour (the latter provides a slightly more rustic texture), some seeds (I use sesame and poppy seeds), a bit of salt and olive oil, and enough water to bind into a dough that will be smooth but not tacky (or it will gunk up your pasta roller).
The crackers you get in return for your efforts are impeccably crisp — sturdy enough to scoop up stuff, but thin enough to shatter under your bite — and will remain so for a few weeks.
This is a good thing because the recipe makes quite a bit, but as long as you’re taking out the roller and preheating the oven, you might as well bake a good batch. And really, once you have them around I don’t think you’ll run out of things to eat them with: hummus, roasted eggplant and yogurt dip, anchoïade, muhammara, peacamole, cashew cheese, you get the idea.
The recipe is naturally open to variations, so you could add the spices and dried herbs of your choice, and possibly some grated hard cheese to the dough. If you decide to play around with the seeds, though, I recommend you stick to teeny ones, or they’ll get in the way of the thinning of the dough.
Sourdough starter note: If you maintain a sourdough starter, you can use up some of your excess starter in this recipe, according to the same conversion rule I’ve described before: here, I’ve been using 100 grams (3 1/2 ounces) 100%-hydration starter, and lowering the amount of flours to 125 grams (4.4 ounces) each and the water to 75 ml (5 tablespoons).
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