Buttery Graham Crackers

April 17th, 2014  |  5 Comments

I don’t have nostalgic feeling towards graham crackers. They’re good and all, especially when called on to settle queasiness after giving blood. My friend loves to eat them with a cup of tea or as a midnight snack.

That’s all well and good, and if that’s where your graham crackers begin and end, then you’re in for an easy recipe here that is very, very tasty.  These have a deep, soulful flavor from the honey, cinnamon and molasses. And the butter really comes through, making these seem more like a cookie than a cracker.

I, on the other hand, love my graham crackers for crusts. All pastry chefs have a nagging sensation that everything needs to be made from scratch, whether truly necessary or not. We like to bake our own pumpkin to get puree for pumpkin pies, rather than used canned. We like to make our own puff pastry. Even Braveheart makes her own sprinkles.

This is one of those techniques that mimics a pie dough, where you mix together the dry things, incorporate the butter, and then add the wet things. But unlike pie dough, you can’t make a mistake here, because we’re not worried about keeping anything cold.

So, I guess the cat’s out of the bag — I’m soon going to post another recipe where I pulverize these into dust for my crust-making pleasures, where nothing but graham crackers will do. While we wait for that, we’ll eat the edges, like graham cracker thieves in the night.

If you prefer a gluten-free graham cracker, I did make one a while back for Nainamo bars, and coincidentally, also to be used for crust.

Some tools that I used for this recipe include aluminum sheet pans, and I much prefer the uncoated because they don’t require delicate care. As long as I use parchment paper, they are just as non-stick. I also like to have a pastry brush on hand to deal with the excess flour.

Buttery Graham Crackers

I purposely didn’t use any sort of mixer here, so anyone can stir their way through this using good old-fashioned manual labor, but if you have one, by all means, make your life easier.

Recipe makes about 30 crackers, depending, of course, on how big you want to cut them.

1/2 cup (70 g) all-purpose flour

1 3/4 cups (250 g) whole wheat flour

1/2 cup (110 g) granulated sugar

1 teaspoon (4 g) baking powder

1/2 teaspoon (4 g) baking soda

1/2 teaspoon (4 g) salt

1/4 teaspoon(2 g)  cinnamon

1 1/2 sticks (170 g) unsalted butter, which must be softened to room temperature for easy incorporation, and diced into little chunks

1/4 cup (75 g) honey

3 tablespoons (60 g) molasses

1/3 cup (100 g) milk

1 teaspoon (6 g) vanilla extract

 1. Les ingredients for our crackers de graham.

2. All the dry ingredients go into a large bowl.

This means the all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, granulated sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon.

 Stir it all up.

Cut in the butter by mushing it around in the bowl.

This is as much incorporation as I could get.

The honey, molasses and vanilla go into the milk. Give it all a good stir to make a nice, dark sludge.

 Pour that over the buttered dry ingredients.

And work that spatula through until the dough is free of butter lumps. At this point, the dough will be quite soft, thanks to all the softened butter and liquids we just added, and it will need to firm up in the refrigerator before it can be workable enough to roll. I’d say at least 2 hours.

It’s a couple of hours later. Now’s a good time to preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. I grab a hunk of dough, and roll it out directly on a piece of lightly floured piece of parchment so it won’t stick to the table. Ideally, a piece that will fit the sheet pan you plan to bake in.

I sprinkle on more flour as necessary, so the dough doesn’t stick to the rolling pin, using as little as I can get away with. I don’t want to work too much excess flour into the dough.

Because we have leaveners in the dough, the cracker will rise a bit in the oven, therefore, I want to roll this thin. This is still a little too thick.

This is better.

I like to brush all the excess flour off.

You can slide this onto a sheet pan, parchment and all, and bake uncut for about 30 minutes. You can also use a cookie cutter first if you prefer, and re-roll the dough.

The cracker is still quite pliable right out of the oven but will set and crisp up as it cools. When it first comes out, I take the opportunity to cut the shapes I want. You can also use a fork and poke some decorative holes in the tops. Let these cool completely, and store in an airtight container, at room temperature, for about a week.

Or wait till midnight and snack.