Going Crackers

Our Cork Poppers group was planning to meet and Rick and I volunteered to bring bread for the tasting and dinner and crackers for the tasting. There's always an elaborate cheese platter and pretty much everything on it is eaten by the end! This selection is from last summer's gathering.

It was suggested to me by my friend Kim that perhaps I should make the crackers. After all, Rick was making the bread.

Good idea. So, I searched for cracker recipes, coming upon those by all the one-named cooks: Ina, Julia and Martha. And there were many more. These are Ina's. Not bad -- not really "crackery" -- more buttery like a sable. In fact, she should have named them sables, not crackers. But a tad rich.

Then I tried three recipes with varying degrees of success. The long, flatbreads are from the "Toledo Blade" and would have been fine if I'd rolled them thinner, but the dough kept springing back. The big round ones were Julia's and I gave them a big zero. The little round cheesy ones are from Joy the Baker.

Those were good. But I needed more than one kind. When moaning about this to blogger Marilyn, she shared her recipe for me, which reminds me of biscotti.

You bake loaves of bread with lots of seeds and cranberries. Refrigerate the end product and the next day you cut them into cracker pieces and bake again for awhile on a low oven to make the crisp and dried out -- very crackery!

Yay! Blog Land comes through!

The Poppers got Joy the Baker and Marilyn the Blogger. And, since Marilyn's dry-out method worked, I was able to rescue the Toledo Blade.Here's the finished basket (the ones in the bowls were the Trader Joe's {Plan B.)

Ina is worth another try. Less butter or maybe better kneading. But apart from Marilyn's, I really recommend Plan B unless you have lots of time and are feeling particularly adventurous! (Note: I'm going to try Marilyn's method with other savory quick bread recipes, too!)

Coming next -- Our Cork Poppers reviews of the Wines of Italy!