When Honeycrisps were still fresh and not reaching the mealy apple season, I bought some of the most excellent cheese (St. Andrew someone cheese and Taleggio) from the Seward Co-Op to pair with them for dessert. Apples and cheese make t met the same standards as the cheese and apples. such a beautiful pairing, but what our household was missing were crackers that met the same standards. We HAD crackers. In fact we HAVE HAD crackers in the pantry. As in for years. Sitting there. not being eaten. Suffice to say, they were not up to par. After this discovery, I made it my point to make my own crackers.
Using the Information Superhighway, I rediscovered the Daring Bakers Lavash Cracker challenge. The recipe they used came from page 178 Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, which we luckily own (yeh!). If you aren’t so lucky, you can find the recipe here. The only thing I changed with this recipe was the inclusion of using my mixer rather than kneading and rolling by hand. I used the dough hook to knead and I used our new pasta roller to roll the dough out super thin…
…which obviously doesn’t make for an interesting picture. I started out on the first setting and went as thin as the fourth or fifth setting. I ran the dough through each setting in between a few times to get a smooth texture as well as the right shape and length.
I also opted not to cut the dough. After it was rolled thin, the shape it was in was the shape it baked at because I preferred the rustic appearance of the crackers after they were snapped in half and in other shape. However, some Daring Bakers took Reinhart’s cutting suggestions and created very beautiful Lavash straws.
Despite the colorful picture in the book featuring a rainbow of spices and seeds, I instead stuck with Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper as toppings for my crackers. I may have over seasoned them though.
super artistic presentation
These crackers were too fabulous on their own that we completely forgot about the cheese and crackers. Perhaps this is just a new excuse to make more though?
[...] Homemade lavash crackers, Ghirardelli grand fudge cupcakes, bacon parmesan lentils, and braised buttery leeks. var addthis_pub = "heavytable"; var addthis_options = 'favorites, digg, delicious, stumbleupon, twitter, facebook, reddit, more'; var addthis_brand = "The Heavy Table"; [...]