Stand in the cracker aisle in your grocery
store, and it's easy to become overwhelmed by the hundreds of options. What should you choose? From worst to first, here's our rundown of
which snack crackers you should reach for, and what to avoid at all costs. When you feel the snacktime itch start crawling
around the deepest corners of your lizard brain, do you often wish you could reach for
small, cracker-sized portions of paper-coated drywall? If so, Wasa Crisp Bread is here to answer
your prayers. While calling this product "bread" is an insult
to freshly-baked loaves, bakers, and bakeries everywhere, this dense cracker sports a spectacular,
shattering crunch that also manages to be completely flavorless. Sure, you could argue that it makes it easier
to taste whatever you decide to top it with to try to make it even the slightest bit satisfying,
but there's still a problem. Each bite swells and fills your mouth to the
choking point, making an accompanying beverage — or anything that can wash the taste of
Wasa Crisp Bread out of your mouth — a must. With the entire landscape of interesting,
flavorful snack cracker options spread out before you, why, oh why, would you reach for
a box of Keebler Club Original crackers after the age of seven? Maybe only if you're looking for a bit of
nostalgia with your snacking and fine, we'll give you that. While the crackers earn high marks for their
weird butter flavor and even more unexpected saltiness, the too-light, crispy texture makes
for an insubstantial, unsatisfying cracker that's just going to leave you hangry. Sure, you can top them with a few slices of
sharp cheddar cheese or some sliced salami and ratchet up their desirability, but then
again, you could just eat the cheese and meat by itself and skip these dumb crackers altogether. This is one of the few entries in our ranking
that comes from the "sweet" category, if you can even call graham crackers sweet. Their genre-busting indecisiveness is what
earns low marks for graham crackers; they're certainly not a savory snack, but they also
aren't something we'd reach for when our sweet tooth needed massaging. Graham crackers are weirdly gritty, taste
a little bit like the cloud of dust you get when you clap two chalkboard erasers together,
and they're not good for anything but covering in chocolate and burnt marshmallows. Graham crackers, you're fine, but you're never
going to be our go-to snack. They're just weird. But, when you know they were invented by a
19th century reverend who thought a bland but healthy diet was the key to stopping mankind's
moral collapse into anarchy and ending all impure thoughts and immoral urges, well, graham
crackers suddenly make a whole lot of sense. Think about it for a minute, and you'll probably
realize that the last time you voluntarily ate any kind of saltine was during a bout
with the stomach flu, after you spent the day half-asleep on the couch watching The
Price is Right while your mom brought you Pedialyte popsicles and you prayed for a swift
death. No one eats them on purpose; in fact, they're
at their best when they're used as either an ingredient for something else or a vehicle
for transporting other, better, messier foods from your plate to your mouth. The slogan for every brand of saltines should
just be, "Yeah, here are Saltines, I guess" because that's the only time anyone ever eats
them: When they're there and we're already sick. "Does anyone need water or saltines?" "I would feel safer with some saltines." The greatest trick the Annie's corporation
ever pulled off was taking products that already exist, like boxed macaroni and cheese or Goldfish
crackers, repackaging them in hip-looking boxes touting their organic ingredients, and
convincing moms the world over that they were somehow feeding their kids a healthier alternative
to the junk they themselves were raised on. Sure, Annie's Cheddar Bunnies may not have
any artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives, but in removing those elements, Annie's has
also removed flavor from their snack crackers. They're grainy, dusty, chalky, and would taste
much better with a heaping scoop of MSG and some good old fashioned artificial cheddar
flavor. How do you eat Ritz Bits, those shrinkified
buttery Ritz crackers spread with gritty fake goo and pressed into adorable little sandwiches? Do you nibble on them one at a time with pinky
firmly extended, taking demure little bites? Or do you crack open a single-serve package,
open your mouth as wide as it will go, and see if you can manage to shoehorn the entire
bag into your mouth in one shot? This is important, and will dramatically affect
your enjoyment of Ritz Bits crackers. However, we're not going to tell you which
technique is the correct one. Fun fact: No one has ever bought a package
of Ritz Crackers on purpose. They've sort of just always been there, in
the forgotten back reaches of your pantry, waiting for the moment when your house is
suddenly visited by a horde of hungry toddlers, who will stuff their mouths full of the buttery
crumbs and then laugh uproariously at an episode of Paw Patrol, blowing a soggy spray of chewed
up cracker all over the front of the high-definition television that cost more than your car. There's no room for Ritz Crackers in the lives
of grownups, even though eating an entire sleeve of them in one sitting is oddly satisfying
and delivers a weird sense of accomplishment. If you think you've done nothing with your
day, eat a sleeve of Ritz Crackers. Then you'll have done something: you'll have
experienced regret. When you moved out and got your own crummy
studio basement apartment for the first time, you probably bought a box of Toasteds to mark
the occasion. After all, you're an adult now; no more crappy
kid's crackers for you, you budding sophisticate. Toasteds are thinner and lighter than other
mass market crackers, and come in an array of totally-not-a-kid-anymore flavors like
"Savory Onion" and "Whole Wheat." Squint hard enough at the surface of a Toasted,
and you'll probably be able to make out little flecks of grain, which is how you can tell
that these crackers are basically medicine. Being a grown-up is occasionally overrated,
and these crackers perfectly demonstrate just how thin that line is. If the gluten-free craze has done anything
for us as a society, it's forced snack food manufacturers to consider how to present familiar
products in innovative new ways. Blue Diamond Almond Nut Thins are made with
nuts and rice, and contain no grain whatsoever, which results in a product that's weirdly
addictive, mainly because the whole time you eat them, you think, "Do I like these? Do I think these are crackers? If my body didn't know how to process wheat
gluten, would eating these make me feel less mad about it?" Only you can decide, and only these crackers
will bring a heaping helping of existential questions to the plate with them. Wheat Thins probably seem like they're arriving
a little bit high on this list, don't they? But have you actually had a Wheat Thin lately? The long-forgotten snack food of '80s-era
moms everywhere, particularly the ones who spent all of their spare time working out
to aerobics VHS tapes and wearing white Reeboks with smart gray flannel pants suits, Wheat
Thins are often overlooked in favor of flashier, more intensely-flavored crackers. But that's just not fair. We love how little and thin they are, with
just a slight slick of grease and that unmistakable flavor that's nutty and salty, with just the
faintest hint of sweetness poking through all of that whole grain goodness. Yep. We said it. Whether you mainline them straight from the
paper bag, or pack them in tiny plastic Ziplocks for on-the-go playground snacking, Goldfish
crackers always satisfy. And while they're available in a variety of
sizes and flavors, it's the Cheddar variety that keeps us coming back, handful after handful. After handful. They're perfectly light, airy, and crunchy,
with flavor that never overpowers and that won't cause palate fatigue, even after eating
a whole bag. Goldfish has even managed to convince us that
eating a pile of their smiling crackers is somehow more virtuous and healthy than, say,
a can of Pringles, which means that Goldfish are essentially good for you. Who are we to argue? Crunchy pretzels are delicious, but they can
be a tad overwhelming; all of that salt and heft from the dough makes them satisfying
but hard to eat more than just a few of. Snack Factory has addressed this problem by
boiling pretzels down to their most delicious elements: The toasty outside, and the salt. They've done away with the bulk of the pretzel
middle, resulting in a crispy, crunchy, chiplike product that's perfect for eating by itself
or using as a vehicle for scooping up cheese spreads and dips. Better Cheddars get kind of a bad rap, often
portrayed as just another pretender to the Cheez-It cheese cracker throne that somehow
falls short. But we think Better Cheddars are more than
just another Cheez-It competitor; it's a cracker that stands all on its own. Packing tons of cheddar cheese flavor into
a slim, crunchy profile, Better Cheddars taste like what would happen if you ran over a dump
truck full of Cheez-Its with a steamroller, saturated the crumbs with salty seawater,
stamped the resulting mash into thin rounds, and baked them until toasty and crispy which,
now that we think about it, we're pretty sure we saw on the Better Cheddars episode of How
It's Made. It also could have just been a delicious,
delicious dream. There are two products that share a texture
unlike anything else on Earth: Shredded Wheat cereal and Triscuit brand snack crackers. And chances are, you probably feel pretty
strongly about the texture of these crackers, one way or the other. In a food manufacturing process that makes
the United States the envy of the world, wheat is softened by water and steam and pushed
through a shredder, until it piles up in little haystacks of grain perfect for topping with
a slice of cheese or a piece of pepperoni. The finished product, those little salty area
rugs of whole grain deliciousness, stand alone in their category, and for that, we salute
them. "What… they don’t need toppings." “Paul!” “Dano.” “Paul…” Did you expect Lance Toast Chee, or for that
matter any entry from the wide world of "nutritionally void traffic-cone-orange cracker and peanut
butter sandwiches," to land this high on the list? We didn't either, until we started to lay
out the candidates, and evaluate each cracker using a highly-scientific bracket system. But the results are in, and nine times out
of 10, we'll reach for an inexpensive package of these junk crackers before almost any other
candidate. They're crispy, they're salty, and they're
dirt-cheap, making them an ideal snack for a road trip or an overnight hike through the
mountains. Though let's face it: If you're the kind of
person who hikes, you've probably never tasted a Lance Toast Chee cracker sandwich, and honestly? You're the one who's missing out. They're not the first cheese-flavored cracker
to enter our ranking, but if you expected any other snack cracker to top the list, you're
just not taking your cracker game seriously enough. Cheez-Its tick every box in the satisfying
snacking to-do list: They're topped with big, coarse granules of salt, packed with tons
of perfectly balanced real and artificial sharp cheddar cheese flavor, and can be eaten
by the heaping fistful. Members of our staff have been known to mow
through an entire box in one sitting in a semiconscious fugue state, as the power of
the Cheez-It takes over our sensibilities and sense of propriety and encourages us to
eat more and more, until our stomachs are stretched taut with a mash of partially-digested
orange cracker goo. "Body by Cheez-It!" Check out one of our newest videos right here! Plus, even more Mashed videos about your favorite
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