Hi and a huge welcome to Steve's Kitchen I don't know if you've noticed these
delicious gourmet crackers that are turning up all over the world in
supermarkets. They look absolutely gorgeous and delicious. Here we've got
the fig and black olive but they have one thing in common and that is that
they're super expensive. I mean you get a really small pack, it's about a hundred
grams, three and a half ounces, they can be anywhere from four to six dollars. So
if you're having a bit of a dinner party before you've even gone and got your
cheese or your charcuterie, you've actually possibly got sort of $20 worth
of crackers. Now I don't know about you but I think that's crazy expensive.
Luckily we can make these at home for a fraction of the cost. If you have a look,
here's the store bought, here's my homemade, both are absolutely delicious.
This one is my cranberry and pumpkin seeds and this is the one we're going to
be making today. So come along let's make these gourmet crackers. Now ideally for
this recipe you want these little miniature loaf tins. I think they're
about five and a half inches, two and a half, probably about a couple of inches
deep. It's not essential, you could probably do a larger version of this.
Luckily the rest of this is pretty simple, the ingredients for this is just
all in the bowl and mix up. To make it nice and simple I'm going to list all
the ingredients down below for you. We start with our all-purpose flour, an
equal amount of a wholemeal flour, into a mixing bowl. We've got some flat oats or
oatmeal, some compacted brown sugar, some sunflower seeds. I'm going for
cranberries, you could use raisins, apricots, anything you like. Our seasoning,
we've got black pepper, salt, cinnamon, rosemary, allspice, some thyme and of
course a bit of baking powder. Pop that in with our ingredients, 1 cup of milk
and a quarter cup of Greek yogurt and then we can mix all our ingredients up
to a nice thick batter. Now check your batter is a similar consistency to mine
and then we're going to spoon our batter into our little mini loaf tins, give them
a little knock down. So you can see we filled it a little shy of the top of the
tin. Now we need to bake these little loaves for about 25 minutes in an oven, I
preheated to about 180 degree Celsius, 350 Fahrenheit and they're going to rise
and be like a perfect little loaf. Now when the little loaves come out of the
oven they're going to be super hot, I'll give them a little wiggle, wow that is
hot. I'm going to pop them down onto a cooling rack, so once they've cooled down
we're going to wrap them in some plastic wrap and we're gonna put them in the
freezer for about an hour to firm up, not to actually solid freeze but just to make
them easier for us to slice. Now our little loaves are reasonably solid, now I must stress
don't freeze them solid because otherwise you're going to have to let them
defrost a little bit before you can cut through them but now they're fairly
solid, we can slice these really thin, which is what we want. So we start with
this end, we'll probably have a little Salvage edge. So I'm just going to slice
down through, you see that is quite firm now and ideally we want about quarter of
an inch maybe a couple of millimeters and we're just going to keep slicing
down. So you can see there just how thin I'm cutting these and we're just
going to lay them out on a baking sheet and now for the final Bake. We're going to
cook these at a low temperature about 120 degrees Celsius 250 Fahrenheit for
about 50 minutes, so it's a little bit like a biscotti. When they come out
they're going to be super crisp and beautiful, sort of golden brown. Now when
you take the crackers out of the oven let them cool down, you're going to end
up with this beautiful big plate of gourmet crackers and I can tell you
these are so delicious but just look how many I've got there. I actually made a
second batch up earlier today so I've got a tin here that's almost half full.
So if I take my shop bought packet out, pop them on the tray there and we make a
comparison. This is about four or five dollars worth of crackers and I
calculated if I put the ones that are in the tin that this is about five dollars
worth of crackers as well
and if I take one of my crackers and a little bit of this herby cream cheese
and just spread it on there. We've got enough delicious crackers here
to feed an army. I'm going to tuck in and give this a try I know the Shop bought
ones are great, let's try mine. Let me just finish what's
in my mouth. They are super crunchy and so delicious.
Now the store-bought ones as well by the way are super crunchy, they're pretty
hard, if you've got any reasons you don't want particularly hard crackers, just
cook them a little bit less time and they'll be fine. I like them as they are.
I hope you give this a try at home, come up with some little combinations,
different styles of crackers, comment down below, share it across with
everybody so we can come up with some great gourmet crackers in the comments
as well. Be good and I will see you for another episode of Steve's kitchen very
shortly, take care.