Crackers are the ultimate anarchist's recipe. The hardest thing about crackers is cleaning the processor, and if you mix flour and fat and water by hand then it's even more simple.
Flour + fat +water. Roll out. Bake.
Cheese can replace oil or hard fat. Pretty much any liquid can replace water. These crackers were lightened slightly with a scant 1 teaspoon baking powder.
Any flour will work. It is not necessary to develop the gluten in wheat flour for crackers, so here is a chance to experiment with greater percentages of whole wheat, or rice, corn, masa harina, or any ground beans. All dry beans can be milled in a coffee grinder. Percentages are completely arbitrary. Add the amount of any type of fat that you decide you want to go with the amount of dry flour you decide to use. Then add water in increments until the flour/fat combination comes together into a dough. Season to your hearts contentment. A dough that is slightly more wet than dry is easier to roll out and to trim.
See what I am telling you? You choose the main dry ingredient or combination by impulse. You choose the type of fat. It can be liquid fat, solid, plant, animal, cheese, or any combination. You choose the liquid, typically water. You can include any spice at all or any addition you desire to have. Good choices are rosemary, oregano, dry chile pepper, salt of course, diced sun-dried tomato, to name just a few. You can mix the spices in the dough or you can press them onto the surface of the rolled dough.
I resist even providing a recipe because my stronger urge is to leave it all open to your own unbound imagination, but I've learned through comments here that some readers are just so concrete. So very well then, here you go:
Preheat oven to 375℉/190℃, arrange rack in the center of the oven.
* 2 cups all purpose flour
* 1 cup whole wheat flour (in this case Kemet milled at home)
* 1 + 1/4 cup grated cheese (two wedges of cheese were unlabeled, 1/4 cup was Parmisiano Reggiano. The cheese can be anything. Cheddar is wonderful, blue cheese are great, blends are best of all.
* 1+1/2 cup water added in increments up to 2 cups. This batch took 2 full cups water which is unusual.
* 1 teaspoon salt
* 1 level teaspoon cayenne chile pepper
* 1 level teaspoon baking powder
Roll out the dough onto a Silpat or parchment paper cut to fit the baking tray you use to exactly 1/8" thickness. <--- kidding. Obviously thin crackers will bake more quickly and be more fragile when done. Thicker crackers will take slightly longer to dehydrate in the oven.
Score the dough in the shapes and sizes you desire for your crackers. I use a bench scrapper and press nearly all the way through the dough.
Dock each cracker with the tines of a fork. This allows air to escape each individual cracker as it bakes and prevents them from puffing into little cracker balloons. If you want puffed up fragile balloon-like crackers that are unsuitable for dipping, then by all means, omit the docking step, those are fun too.
Bake for 10 minutes.
Okay, here is where you have to use your *gasp* judgement and your *sweat* intuition. You baked your first batch. Tilt the baked crackers onto a cooling rack. Assess their crispiness. Not dry enough? Need more baking time? Should they be thinner? Too dark? Enough salt? Sufficiently seasoned? Flavor need adjustment? Oven hot enough? Too hot? Dough too dry? Too wet? Make any adjustment to the dough, or to your rolling, the oven, or the timing that you feel is necessary. As it turns out, these crackers were perfect on the first batch *buffs fingernails on shirt *.
Just like crackers, hummus is a nearly blank slate upon which are written your impulses. There are a hundred trillion variations. <-- forgive me, I've been listening to the budget speeches and I've lost the ability to judge when magnitude is outrageously exaggerated.
Since the crackers are already heavily flavored with cheese and with cayenne, then the hummus is made plain as hummus comes. Usually one would include sumac for authenticity or at least cumin, but I omitted all spices except pepper, even omitting chile pepper because I didn't want to double up on it. So, most out of character, I made this hummus particularly plain as far a hummus goes.
I wish more people would take up this technique of milling dry beans in a coffee mill. It simplifies things and speeds things tremendously. There is not even a need for a processor.
Crushed garlic is lightly toasted in olive oil then the frying action squelched by the addition of chicken broth. I added the full amount of chicken broth that I imagined the chickpea powder would take, which turned out to be an underestimation by at least 100%. The milled dry chickpea powder was added and whisked in then water added in increments to the desired thickness. The milled chickpeas with its garlic and olive oil kept taking up more and more water. Pepper was added, but not salt because the commercial chicken broth is fairly heavily salted, tahini, lemon then mint to finish. The herb needn't be mint. Parsley is the customary herb of choice, basil or cilantro are both fine.
* 1/4 cup olive oil
* 2 garlic cloves
* 1 + 1/2 cup commercial chicken broth
* 1 cup dry chickpeas milled in a coffee grinder to a fine powder
* 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
* 1 + 1/2 cups water, up to 2 or more cups depending on how much the chickpeas take up and how thick or thin you want your hummus.
* 1 tablespoon tahini. Honestly, in mixture there is very little appreciable difference between tahini and peanut butter. It wouldn't bother me at all to substitute. Sesame seed oil has a more distinct sesame flavor than all the commercial tahini that I've tried. The best tahini I ever had were the two I made at home, one husked and the other unhusked. The unhusked version absorbed an amazing amount of olive oil. Ultimately, though, it isn't worth the bother.
Of course you can use chickpeas in a tin and process them with a portion of the liquid. You can also soak and cook dry chickpeas then process them. Tins. Processing. Bother. Milling to powder in a coffee bean mill. FUN!
I don't know why I thought that 1 cup of dry chickpeas would produce 1 cup of hummus. By the time the powder stopped absorbing liquid there was close to three cups total humus. It kept growing and GROWING and GROWING and GROWING!
This hummus has an amusing bouncy spongy texture that I never saw before. You know what would be great mixed in with the rest of this hummus? Onions. Raisins. Nuts. Artichoke hearts. Tomato. ¿Pineapple? Pine nuts. More cheese. Avocado chunks. Banana. Brown sugar. Honey. Golden syrup. Maple syrup. Red bell pepper. I wonder if wine or some kind of alcohol would go in it.
Nice article. I'm jealous that your crackers were so easy. I'm trying to make crackers with other flours besides wheat, just for the fun of it, and it shows why wheat is so popular; things are more straightforward with wheat.
ReplyDeleteI'm skeptical about using uncooked chickpeas for the humus. For one thing, I need to soak my beans in order to avoid the intestinal gas problem. Soaking also removes or reduces their phytic acid, which inhibits or reduces our digestive system's ability to absorb iron and other minerals. An alternative could be to simply soak them overnight, then grind the soaked chickpeas. The odd bouncy spongy texture could be because you used dried chickpeas. But all of the recipes I've ever seen say to use cooked chickpeas. The nice thing about your method is that you get to use chicken stock; when you soak beans you're supposed to throw away the soaking water and rinse them well before you cook them.
If you'd rather cook your own chickpeas instead of using the canned ones you can cook them in a pressure cooker; 13 to 18 minutes if they've been soaked, then 10 minutes for the pressure to come down. I'm assuming you'd be using a new generation pressure cooker; e.g. Fagor. Soaking is still a good idea here because they cook evenly (and it takes much less time) when they've been soaked. http://goo.gl/gdvrQ
I bought a bag of black chickpeas from the local Indian market but haven't tried them yet.