When most people think of the word sourdough their minds automatically associate the word with bread. I mean, it is the whole point of having a starter, to make and bake beautiful, crusty, tangy loaves of sublimely delicious sourdough bread.
But....
In order to have that option of sourdough bread creation, you need to have a starter, and starter's require care and feeding like any other living creature. Which of course means that you often have starter that needs to be used and a person can only eat so much bread.
Sure, I could stick my little starter friend in the fridge and feed it infrequently, which I will probably do this summer, but right now I am enjoying caring for my yeasty little pal on a daily basis. That, and I am absolutely crackers over experimenting with the starter for making things other than bread.
Speaking of crackers....
One of my favorite lunches is to make a little charcuterie plate full of meats, cheeses, veggies, etc, and sometimes, on days I eat starch, I love to have an assortment of crackers.
One day, as I was whipping up some sourdough starter waffles for the kiddos, I started pondering how I could make some delicious homemade crackers with the stuff, and today I am going to share with you the results of that experimentation.
And my friends, this is one of my all time favorite recipes that I have EVER created! There are these Italian seasoned pita chip style crackers that I adore, and my sourdough crackers capture that flavor and taste and texture in an even more awesome way!
Okay, I will quit bubbling like an over-fed starter and get to the recipe.
Before I threw together the dough, I spent some time concocting an herb and spice blend to flavor my soon to be crackers with. Living on a culinary lavender farm has its perks, and one of them is that I have a pretty much never-ending supply of glorious-tasting lavender to experiment with.
I threw a bit of lavender, some Italian seasoning, a bit of rosemary, garlic, and coarse salt into my coffee grinder and pulsed the mix until it was very fine. The smell was divine. And yes, I rhymed just now, it's my blog and I like doing it.
Saucy Kat behavior aside, I then measured out some starter, flour, and butter and put it in a mixing bowl. As I walked around the eating bar to collect my spice grinder, I carefully did a bit of potential cat and dog tripping hazard recon on the immediate area. I don't know if it is because it is spring or what, but dang it if all my animals seem to have it in for me. You should have seen the impromptu after lunch cattle round up I had to engage in yesterday!
After making sure the coast was pet clear, I bolted around my eating bar, grabbed the ground spices, and kerplunked them into the bowl with the other ingredients. I might have been a bit overly enthusiastic in my kerplunking, but hey, at least my sinuses are now clear!
Using a wooden spoon, I mixed the ingredients together to make a nice, slightly sticky cracker dough. I also gave up on the spoon and used my hands after a bit. This always happens, it looked like playdough, and I am not sorry.
I then wrapped the dough in plastic wrap and popped it in the fridge. I was initially going to chill it for thirty minutes, but thanks to my frisky cows, it got more like an hour of chilling.
After putting away my bovines, I came in, washed my hands, grabbed out some parchment paper, floured it, and began rolling out my cracker dough. I divided the dough into two pieces because I have found that I am rolling challenged. Smaller is better in my case. If there is anyone out there who can roll out a perfect square of dough, well, I salute you!
Once I got my squares as thin as I thought they needed to be (like 1/16th of an inch), I took a pizza wheel and cut them into not at all even squares of around an inch total. I had made a note to oil the dough before I cut it, but guess what? I forgot each time because sometimes I am a dolt in the recipe step department. Also, I am a dolt sometimes. Super dolt.
Anyway, after brushing oil on top of my new little crackers, I then got to stab them! Yep, that is the trick to keeping your homemade crackers from puffing up too much while baking, you gotta take a fork to em! I stabbed each little square with a fork. It was for their own good....
The final step is to sprinkle a little bit of flaky salt on top of the crackers and then pop them into the oven for a good bake. I rotated my crackers halfway through baking time, because again, it seemed like a smart thing to do.
After 22 minutes of oven time, they looked amazing! I let them cool for a bit on a rack, but honestly, I grabbed one and tasted it before they were out of the oven for a full minute.
Holy crusty comestible! These sourdough crackers are so divine. I don't know what it is about lavender, but when the ratios are right, it elevates food to the stratosphere of awesomeness. I'm not going to say these crackers are the easiest or non-time consuming things to bake in the world, but I am going to be making them at least once a week, because the effort involved is beyond worth it. These little crunchies are superior to store bought crackers in every way!
Plus, I adore their irregular sizes, it's endearing馃槉
And on that note, I'll leave you with the recipe. There's a barn and fence that needs repairing around these parts, and a cow-chastising aria that needs to be delivered to some probably not repentant bovines while I do so.
Sourdough Crackers
1 cup sourdough starter
1 cup all purpose flour
4 Tablespoons room temperature butter
1/4 tsp dried culinary lavender (if you don't have this, just sub in more Italian seasoning)
1 tsp Italian seasoning
1/4 tsp dried rosemary
1/2 tsp salt
olive oil
flaky saltIn a coffee grinder (or mortar and pestle), finely grind lavender, Italian seasoning, rosemary, and salt.
In a mixing bowl, add starter, flour, butter, and ground seasoning and mix until dough forms. Wrap dough in plastic wrap and chill for at least 30 minutes.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Remove dough from fridge, divide in two, and roll out each piece on a floured piece of parchment paper. Roll dough into a squareish shape 1/16th of an inch thick. You will have uneven edges, it's cool, they still taste good!
Brush dough with olive oil and cut in 1 inch by 1 inch squares using a pizza cutter. Sprinkle crackers with flaky salt, slide parchment containing crackers onto a cookie sheet, and bake in preheated oven for 22 minutes.
Note: I rotated my cookie sheet about halfway through baking time.
Remove crackers from oven and cool on a rack. Bake the other parchment paper full of crackers on the now available cookie sheet. Once cool, enjoy the crisp, flavorful, crunchy morsels!
And as most of the time, all of the images in this post were taken on the author's nowhere near as naughty as her cows iPhone, with the cover image edited in Canva.