Cheese crackers

The cheese is produced by the impressive cheese makers of Wisconsin. It was on sale at Whole Foods and it is a very good cheddar. I wish I had bought more. This is the last 5 ounces. 

You can make crackers directly from cheese, as a parmesan tulle. Grated cheese directly onto parchment paper or Silpat. Such a cheese tulle can be formed while it is still hot and pliable, shaped around a drinking glass, formed into a basket, and so forth. But cheese crackers are different from that.

It's as if you are diluting the cheese with flour. Making up for the dilution with spices, apologizing for it by increased flavor, compensating for the blandness of the stretching material with excitement. And more fat. Good fat. 

So the cheese is turned into particles surrounded by flour particles. Then water is added to turn the flour therein to paste that unites and holds everything together. A paste that can be dealt with. A paste in the form of dough. Wet dough that can be lightened with baking powder. Flavored. Manipulated. Moistened or dried. Spread out thinly or thickly. Decorated if desired. Baked.

The whirling disc of death. It does in half a second FrrrrrraP! what would otherwise take ... several, um ... well I guess it saves a couple of minutes. 

The whirling disc of death is switched out for the spinning scimitars of massacre. Two cups all purpose flour added and processed further. More than shown below. To near complete homogenization of cheese and butter and flour. 

Water is added incrementally through the feed tube while processing. Do not tarry. It is very easy to overprocess once the flour gets wet. You do not want to develop the gluten as you would with bread. Here the flour is stretching material for the cheese and glue to form a stiff paste with cheese, it is not intended to build a gluten network that is expected to contain expanding air bubbles. 

The seeds of life with the spinning short blades of hurt. The coriander and the cumin seeds have potential. Up until now they could have grown. Odd, to value the seeds for their flavor more than for their growing potential, but that's the way it is. I don't think the pepper seeds would grow. They've been through too much already, boiled or something as part of the process. I never tried planting black peppercorns. 

At length I did learn that each round coriander seed is actually two seeds. That is why two plants sprout from one spot when they finally get around to germinating. 

The cheese-paste, the dough, is rolled out. The dough could have been wetter, it could have been rolled out more thinly, it could have gone undocked, it could have taken less spices. 

Space-saving animated GIF. If you would prefer the jpg version of the photos.