(Emmy vocalizing) - Okay, do I have everything? Do I have everything? I think I do. I think. And if we don't, that's okay, because we're gonna go
ahead and get started. (happy upbeat music) Greetings, my beautiful
lovelies, it's Emmy. How are you? It's great to see you, and
welcome back to my kitchen. Today, I'm gonna be
making homemade crackers. A few of you have gotten in touch with me requesting that I make homemade crackers due to supply chain shortages
in your area of the woods. So in my area, I have noticed that there have
been holes on the shelves. Some products have been missing, and that's sort of been the
case for the last few months. For a little while, it was cream cheese but I am happy to say, cream cheese has reappeared
on our dairy shelves. At least on our neck of the woods. Other people were happy to tell me that they had no shortage
of cream cheese whatsoever, which is just great. And others have said they too
had cream cheese shortages. And now, I have heard that
there are cracker shortages. All different kinds of crackers. And I'm here to make a very
simple plain soda cracker, or saltines. I don't know what you call
them, depending where you live. I happen to call them saltines. They are the square crackers
that are light and airy; have a very plain taste to them. You dip them into your soup. You have them with a little bit of cheese; you smear 'em with a little
bit of peanut butter. They come in sleeves in a four pack. I think most of you may know
what a saltine cracker is -- although you may not call it that. Apparently, other people
call it soda crackers, but they're pretty ubiquitous. I think pretty much all over the world, you can find this plain
version of a cracker. For me, it is the crunch
that I love so much, that little bit of salt on top. We, I think most of us,
know what it's like to eat a stale cracker. And it's just not quite the same. You know when you've opened the
sleeve and you've let it sit particularly if it's been a humid day and a couple days later, you go back for those little crackers and they're just a little bit, they don't have that really light crunch. Yes. Well, I am gonna be attempting to try to make homemade crackers. For those of you that don't
have crackers on your shelves, you can make them for yourself. I'll be using a recipe that I found from restlesschipotle.com and I'll put a link down
below to the original in case you are interested. Alrighty, let's go ahead and get started. Behind me, I have my oven
preheated at 325 degrees. Now, according to this recipe, I should be able to prepare these crackers in about a half an hour with very minimal ingredients, probably ingredients you already have. Win-win. And it's about five or six ingredients, six ingredients if you include the salt. Now I am opting to go
for a very plain cracker, but if you wanna add cheese,
if you wanna add black pepper, if you wanna add any herbs and spices, feel free to do that and
make these crackers your own. But I'm just going for the run of the mill plain cracker today. So in a large bowl, I'm
going to measure out four cups of plain all purpose flour. Look at this container. Isn't it great? I found this at a thrift store. It just popped open 'cause
I'd knocked the latch, and it is a Community
Kitchen's Fresh-O-Lator. Look at that. Can you see that? It says The Fresh-O-Lator. Isn't that cool? I love old vintage stuff like this. And this is the selling point for me: right here, on this latch, right there, it says, "press it down here". Can you see that? It's so cool. It's like etched in here. Apparently this was used to hold coffee -- and, listen to this:
(sound of lid popping open) It has a little gasket on the inside here, so it keeps moisture out.
This is a super tight fit. (latch clicks) That latch is just such a pleasure. Alrighty. Now that I've showed
you my flour container, I'm gonna measure out four cups. Now, the reason why I like
a nice, wide container for my flour is that I can actually put my measuring cup in there. So I learned from King Arthur Flour that this is the correct way
to measure out your flour. Like this. Oops. You sprinkle the flour into
the measuring container and slide off the top
so it's nice and even. In my opinion, the best
way to measure out flour is by weight. But we're not doing it by weight today, because the recipe calls
for volumetric measure. So that's what we're doing. Alrighty, four cups of
flour into our bowl. And to that, we're
going to add our butter. This is butter out of the refrigerator. And if you have a pastry
blender, feel free to use it. I don't. So I'm just using this
little bench scraper to cut the butter in initially and chop it up into small pieces. And then I'm just gonna use my hands to crumble the butter in until it kind of corn meal in consistency. Kind of like we're making a pie crest. Think at this point, I'm gonna go in with my hands
and start squeezing this and getting that butter incorporated. This is gonna add a ton of flavor. I don't have a pack of saltine
crackers in front of me. So I don't know if they
contain any butter. I imagine they don't. They don't taste
particularly buttery to me. In my opinion, they just
taste kind of flaky and salty and plain, just plain crackers. But this recipe calls for butter. So I'm guessing these are
gonna be a little bit tastier. See? Never fails. Wearing something dark while I'm baking. And I'm pushing up my glasses. Speaking of glasses, these glasses come from glassesusa.com. Many of you ask where I get my glasses and that's where these are from. So I'll put a link down below
in case you're interested. Alrighty, keep cutting these in. I actually have a little..... because I don't have
much of a nose bridge, I found these great little,
what would you call them? I don't know -- rubbery doohickeys that
I can put on the ends of the glasses, the arms of the glasses, I think is the technical
word, and they kind of grip behind your ear so that when you look down or move your head around a lot, your glasses don't slide off your nose. Isn't that great? So I don't have a pair
put on these glasses yet, although these don't seem
to need them that badly. Although the summertime is the worst, like when my nose is a little bit sweaty. Okay, this is all a little bit TMI. Sorry. Okay, back to kneading this. Crumble crumble crumble. So to give this a little bit of lift, we're gonna add one tablespoon
of baking powder to this, and now we're gonna add our
milk and form this into a dough. And get our impeccably clean hand in there and work this into a dough. Now this recipe says it
makes about 36 crackers, but of course that's
gonna depend on the size of your crackers. I'm gonna go for the,
you know, square shape... of the saltine. So we're just gonna knead this. We're not necessarily trying
to develop any gluten here. We're not making bread. We just wanna get the
flour and milk incorporated to form a dough. Alrighty. We have our dough here and to make things a little
bit easier on ourselves, we're gonna divide this into quarters. Divide this into quarters. And then reserve the
rest of this for later. That will make it a little
bit more manageable. Now, at this point, we can roll this out. Nice and thinly. Now I'm gonna try to keep
this as a rectangle if I can. And dust it with flour as we
knead so that it doesn't stick. But as of now, I don't
think I'm gonna need it. Now, if you're having a hard
time rolling out your dough, you might just wanna let
it rest a little bit. The gluten or the protein in the flour sometimes needs a little
bit of time to relax. And with that time, the
will hold it shape better, rather than kind of
wanting to shrink back. So the thinner we make our dough, the thinner of course our
crackers are gonna be, but more importantly, they'll
be nice and crisp and light. So I'm gonna try to get this pretty thin. Now when I was making a hardtack, this wasn't as important
because we wanted the opposite, rather than having a flaky fall apart, crusty crispy cracker, we wanted something that
was thick and substantial. I'm gonna be using this
little fluted cutter. It looks like a pizza cutter, but it's got these nice little ridges so that it'll give us a
nice little pretty pattern. And I'll use a ruler for a straight edge. So I'm gonna straighten
this edge off here. Ooh, I've never used this tool before. Very nice. Like that. Voop! Cute! That makes such a nice sound. (tongue trilling) I like that. Ooh, yeah, I like that, like that. And then another two and a half inches. Bloop. There's no need to measure here. I'm just being a little extra. So feel free to make
these nice and rectangular or odd shaped. You know? Don't have to do this. There it is. It almost looks like a
ravioli with no -oli, right? Okay. Now I'm gonna place that onto
an ungreased cookie sheet, and then I'm gonna do that
for the rest of these. I'll be right back. Okay. Now I'm gonna grab a fork and
we're going to prick the dough And this is going to
help keep the crackers from rising too much in the oven. Can you see that? We wanna keep our crackers nice and flat. And I am doing a total of
eight little prick points. See that? Cool. Now we need to attach our salt. And what we're gonna
do is make an egg wash. We're just using the white. So separate our yolk, which
we'll put to good use. And then add about a
teaspoon of water to that. (metal clanking) Sorry for the noise. Then, I've got some salt here,
just plain old, kosher salt. And I'm going to brush each cracker with a little bit of egg white. And sprinkle it with some salt. And then we're gonna pop these into a preheated 325 degree oven and bake for 15 to 20 minutes, but start checking them around 10 minutes. And once they start to golden
and look nice and crispy we'll pull 'em out and allow
them to cool completely before we taste them. It's important to allow
them to cool completely, because that allows them
to get nice and crispy. Alrighty, I'll see you when
all these are nicely baked and we'll give these a taste. Okay. See you a little bit. Alrighty, my lovelies. My crackers are complete. I baked them for about 17 minutes. And even though I pricked them beforehand, a couple of them still kind of poofed up: that one back there, and then
this one right in the corner. Looks a little bit like a turnover, but there are my finished crackers. I baked them in two different batches. The first batch was a little
bit lighter than the second. We'll see how that affects the color. And these are the little scraps that I cut up and then
baked these as well. These were super cute. Loved how these turned out. Kind of like a homemade
version of an oyster cracker. A little bit more golden though. And, as you can hear, they sound crispy. (Emmy giggles) Those ones are so cute. I love those. Alrighty. So let's give one
of the big ones a taste. I'm gonna taste this one first. This is a lighter version here. This is a bit more of the color of the typical saltine cracker that you would buy in the sleeve. And after I baked them,
these are a little bit large, I would say. If you want them to be more
saltine cracker in size, I'd say more like two
inches by two inches square. But still, pretty close. Let's crack it open and see
what the texture's like. Alrighty, I hope this is crispy. Here we go. Mm. Not quite. So, it cracked on the top, but the bottom didn't have
that nice kind of shatteringly like thin crust that I
associate with a saltine. Let's break it again. Yeah, doesn't have that big snap. But the inside looks pretty good. Alrighty, let's give that a taste. Here we go. Itadakimasu. Hmm, nope. That definitely needed,
needs to be baked longer. It's a little bit doughy at the bottom. The taste is pretty good,
very kind of neutral, plain... taste to it. Very similar to a saltine,
but slightly buttery. I think the salt level was pretty good. Make sure you add enough salt, because these are saltines, these soda crackers.... But this definitely is
a little underbaked. Now this was the first
time, for me, this recipe. The first time I baked it,
this was the first batch. So I wasn't sure how
long to cook these for. It said anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes. I did 17 minutes. The second batch I did a little bit longer to get a little bit more of a golden color and let's try one of those. For example, this one right here. That one has more of a golden color to it and it feels lighter. So let's break this one. Here we go. Oh, this one too, has a slightly
kind of doughy interior, but the flakiness looks good. All right, let's try that one. (cracker crunching) Mhmm. That one's definitely better. I think this recipe does a
pretty good job in capturing that saltine flavor. Kind of just plain floury
bland greatness of a saltine, with a little bit of butter
in it, which is very welcomed. Just, the texture's not quite right. And this was definitely baked long enough. Perhaps, I needed to
roll these out thinner. These do look a little bit thick. So, this one looks pretty good. Let's try that one. Yeah. So initially the crunch looks good, but I think -- see how it's
kind of bready at the bottom? Hmm. Again, good flavor, but
texture's not quite right. Let's try the little ones. Look at these. These look really crispy and
they sound really crispy. Let's try one of those. Here we go. (cracker crunching) Yes. 100% yes. Mhmm. So, those have a nice little
nutty toasted flavor to them. The texture is much more cracker-like, although not quite like a saltine. When I imagine saltine soda cracker, I imagine one that's really
flaky and crumbly and thin. Not thin, but like a
layered kind of flakiness. These are more of like a biscuit. What I, American-style biscuit. (laughs) Kind of like that style of cookie biscuit where it's a little bit
more like the hardtack I was talking about earlier. A little more solid. Kind of a little bit
like an animal cracker. Some of those animal crackers
have a little bit more density to them and that's
what these are like, but this definitely has
a crunch of a cracker. Mhmm. And the dryness, while the bigger size seem a little bit wet still. And these were baked right
alongside the larger ones. This was the second batch. I baked these for 18
minutes at 325 degrees. All ovens are gonna be
a little bit different. If you have a convection
oven, you're gonna reduce that down to 300 and bake
them as opposed to 325. So moral of the story here is I think the smaller
size crackers worked better in terms of getting that
really great crisp texture. The flavor is pretty good,
very plain cracker texture. Isn't quite the texture of a saltine. Having said that, I think this would be
a great cracker to have along with the soup or with
a little bit of cheese. I think it's all about
perfecting the proper size. If I were to do this again, I
think I would try baking them on a rack so that the air can
get underneath the cracker. And they're less likely
to be soggy on the bottom. Or roll these out thinner and see if you get a more
crisper cracker that way. Definitely think that would be the case. That's just gonna take
a little bit more time. Alrighty, my lovelies, there you have it. That's how you can make homemade crackers. It's definitely possible. It's not hard. I think it's just a matter
of finding the right time and temperature in your oven, and the correct thickness of your dough. Very, very thin. Thinner than I had done it, if you really wanna really crisp cracker, which I thought was pretty thin already. Also, the recipe said
not to grease your pan. I would go ahead and set your crackers onto a piece of parchment paper, which I did for my second batch, because my first batch did
wanna stick just a little bit. I mean, it wasn't enough to break any of the crackers when I removed them, but there was some hesitation. So just put a little
piece of parchment there. I think if you were to add
butter or something to grease the actual pan, it might
affect the browning. It might make these a little
bit darker than you might want. So yeah, those are my tips and yeah, you can make yourself
homemade crackers at home. Mm. You could also dust these with
cheesy powder, black pepper. Ooh, I think adding black pepper to the actual dough would be lovely or just a little bit of
Parmesan cheese if you like, or you know, herb 'em up however you want or you could actually put some
cheese in the dough itself to make your own cheesy crackers. I've seen some recipes for cheese straws and things like that. Didn't wanna do that with this one because I just wanted a plain cracker. Alrighty, my lovelies. Thanks so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed that one. I hope you learned something. Please share this video with your friends. Follow me on social media. Like this video, subscribe, and I shall see you in the next one. Toodaloo, take care. Bye! (upbeat music) Let's see if I can catch it. Yeah!
