Make Your Own Artisanal Crackers with This Easy Recipe
Never buy overpriced flatbread-style crackers again. This cracker recipe will set you back around $1.50 a batch.
Fancy crackers
Over the past ten years, as cheese boards have gotten fancier and fancier, so have crackers. You know the ones: filled with rosemary and topped with flaky salt, they’re more akin to an artisanal flatbread than the buttery, crumbly crackers of the early 2000s. And thanks to their handmade (yet somehow also perfect) appearance, they’re now sold for close to $10 a box.
We’ve developed and perfected a recipe that may even be better than what you can find in the store — and is easier, faster, and cheaper than you think. And best of all, they look great on a cheeseboard.
The Thousand-Year History of Crackers and Cheese
Cheese and crackers
The history of crackers as we know them began in Roman times, when soldiers were given sheep's milk cheese — similar to Pecorino Romano — alongside “hardtack” for their rations. Hardtack was a dense biscuit made from flour, water, and salt. As both ingredients were portable and non-perishable (to a point) they were ideal for packing on the long journeys that soldiers made across the continent. Those rations were still used over a thousand years later, during the Civil War, and even when pioneers were travelling west.
Pilot bread crackers photo credit depositphotos
So when did crackers go from a food used to survive during a long, hard journey, to a snack we set out when hosting? In 1792, John Pearson of Massachusetts marketed the recipe for his long-lasting biscuits as “pilot bread.” While hardtack had to be soaked in a liquid to make it easier to eat, pilot bread could be eaten straight from its package. And a short while later, in 1801, Joshiah Bent (also of Mass.) overbaked some biscuits, which he called crackers thanks to the way they’d crackle when you bit into them. Cheese and crackers became a regular staple in households, but it wasn’t until the 1950s, when premade and packaged foods — as well as dinner parties — boomed, that crackers and cheese was adopted as a more elevated staple. We can’t forget the invention of Lunchables, either, in the 1980s, which firmly cemented cheese and crackers into the American food canon.
But how did we get from crackers as a ration to artisanal crackers selling for $9 or more a box? The rise of social media and food photography — essentially, serving something that looks just as good, if not better than it tastes, helped these crackers rise. Everyone wants their crackers to look like an Italian nonna or trad-wife painstakingly made them, and are willing to pay the price — even if the ingredients on the back of the box are just flour, water, and salt.
Our Cracker Recipe Cost Breakdown
Cracker ingredients
Let’s do the math, ingredient by ingredient. (For reference, these prices have been sourced from a New York Whole Foods.)
All Purpose Flour: 5 pounds of all purpose flour costs $3.79. Per batch you’ll be spending around 47 cents on flour.
Water: For my calculator’s sake, let’s say this is free.
Olive Oil: 1 liter of olive oil costs $15.29. You’ll use around 68 cents of olive oil per batch. You can spend less or more on your oil, but I’d recommend using a high-quality cooking olive oil, since it provides one of the only flavor to the crackers.
Sea Salt: 26.5 ounces of sea salt is $4.99. There are 159 teaspoons in 26.5 ounces of sea salt — you’ll only be using half a teaspoon, or $0.015 cents of salt per batch.
Flaky Salt: 8.5 ounces of flaky salt costs $6.79. You can make these crackers 17x with that salt, spending around 40 cents a batch. You can forgo this, but it adds texture and pops of salinity, making these crackers craveable.
The grand total? Around $1.50 for a batch of 40 crackers.
Our Artisanal Cracker Recipe
Crackers
You can customize this recipe by adding a teaspoon of chopped fresh herbs like thyme or rosemary, black pepper, or spices like garlic powder or onion powder to up the seasoning. Or, try sprinkling with everything bagel seasoning instead of flaky salt. As they are, though, with no seasoning other than olive oil and salt, they’re an ideal balance to any cheese, providing texture and crunch without standing in the cheese’s way.
Artisanal Cracker Recipe
Recipe by Lee Musho
Makes approx. 40 crackers
Time: 1 hour
2 cups AP flour
½ cup room temperature water
2 tablespoons olive oil
½ teaspoon salt
Olive oil for brushing
Flaky salt for topping
Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Mix flour, water, olive oil, and salt in a mixing bowl until it forms a shaggy ball of dough.
Knead dough for two minutes. Top bowl with clingfilm or a dish towel and let rest at room temperature for half an hour.
Roll out dough until ⅛ inch thick. Cut dough into 1-inch wide, 6-inch long strips.
Place strips on a baking sheet. Brush with olive oil and top with flaky salt.
Bake for 15 minutes or until crackers are firm and golden brown. Store in an airtight container.