Sourdough Crackers

I started to teach myself to bake when I finally decided that yeast was not going to get the better of me. Many years ago I was given a bread making machine and I used that baby more often than a toaster. But using a bread making machine felt a little like cheating and after a while we stopped making our own bread.

Fast forward several years and I decided I wanted to get back into baking. I have a fear of experimenting when baking that I have vowed to overcome. I ventured back into making bread and even made a sourdough. While I love sourdough bread, I feel like I am feeding that thing for eternity until I get around to actually baking the bread. Every time I feed the sourdough I end up throwing away the discard.

The other day when it came time to feed the “monster” as my loving partner likes to call it, I decided, what the heck. I’m going to just throw it out anyway. Why not try making something with it. I dug around and found my cracker recipe and thought, ‘perfect!’ I’ll mess with this recipe. After all, even if it went terribly wrong, I wasn’t really losing anything, but time.

So here is the recipe I came up. Note that I LOVE King Arthur Flour and have several of their ingredients like the pizza seasoning and the cheddar cheese powder. If you don’t have those on hand, feel free to experiment with your own seasonings. I list a few options below.

Sourdough Pizza Crackers

1 cup (or so) of sourdough discard

½ cup of unbleached white flour

½ cup of white whole wheat flour

1 tbs cheddar cheese powder

1tbs pizza seasoning

4-5 tbs cold butter

1 tbs sour cream

When feeding your sourdough, take the remaining discard up to 1 cup and place in bowl. Add the two other flours. (You can use 1 cup of either of the flours instead if you don’t have both.) Add the cheese powder and pizza seasoning. (You can also create your own seasonings at this point.) Cut in cold butter and add the sour cream. Then squish with your hands until you have a ball of dough that is semi dry. If the dough is sticky, add more flour. The dough should hold together in a ball but be mostly dry.

Place your ball of dough on a floured surface and pat down. Then using a rolling pin with a firm hand roll out the dough until it is about 1/8” thick. Do this in as little strokes as possible. It doesn’t have to be perfect. In fact the edges should be rough looking. The idea is to handle your dough only as much as you need to get the final result.

Poke with a fork all over. Cut into squares or shapes of your liking and place on a parchment lined baking sheet.

Place in oven preheated to 350 degrees and bake for 25 minutes or until lightly browned. Be careful, once they start getting brown, they brown fast. Take out and let cool.

Originally, I sprinkled Kosher salt over the crackers before baking, but found with the seasoning it was too much. We’re not a family that likes a lot of salt anyway and the seasonings give the crackers nice flavor.  Feel free to add salt if you like.

Other seasonings you can use are dried thyme, sage or rosemary. Or use garlic powder in place of the cheddars cheese powder. (Maybe reduce the amount a bit) You can pretty much do anything.

These are not your typical store crackers, either. The texture will be slightly different. But they make a delicious savory afternoon snack.

They also make a nice gift around the holidays.

With a few minutes of your time and some sourdough discard you, too, can be a homesteading rock star.

Enjoy!