Rosemary Cracker Bread

Preheat oven to 500 degrees with a large pizza stone on a rack.

Put flour, flax (if you are using it), salt, sugar and rosemary in a food processor. Pulse to blend. Add oil, pulse 3-4 times. Turn machine to ‘on’ and add water in stream till dough comes together. Run for about 20 seconds. Turn dough out and knead to a smooth ball. Divide into four pieces and cover with a towel. Let rest for 5 minutes.

Begin with one of the four dough pieces. Using a pasta roller, start on the widest setting and finish on the thinnest, just as you would for rolling pasta dough. It helps to divide the dough one more time about midway through the rolling process, so that one piece of dough results in two long (approximately 4″ x 15″) strips of rolled dough. I also dust the dough with flour on both sides before rolling at the thinnest setting (which is #7 on my inexpensive manual pasta roller). The two strips get baked at the same time, for a total of four batches of two strips from one cracker bread recipe. I do not begin rolling the second piece of dough until the first batch is cooked. Multitasking for this recipe always results in burned crackers for me!

Spritz dough with water from a spray bottle and sprinkle with sea salt (or kosher) and freshly ground pepper. Slide parchment paper directly into the oven onto the baking stone. Flip crackers over, and move from the front to the back of the oven after about 1 minute. Watch closely. Your oven my vary. You want to flip them after the dough bubbles, but is still pliable. I do this quickly by reaching in with tongs. Watch closely after that. Take them out after no more than a minute—sometimes less. You don’t want them browned. There will be light brown spots or speckles and maybe an edge or two will be darkening, but that’s it. The strips will still be flexible. You can cut them into 6″ lengths at this point with a pizza cutter for uniform sizes, or wait until they are crisp and break them for a more haphazard look.

Cool completely on a rack, then package and store in festive cellophane bags to impress your friends.

If you don’t have a pizza stone large enough to bake the strips on, you can use a large cookie sheet. You will need to dramatically increase the cooking time. Watch for the dough to begin to bubble, give it another 30 seconds to a minute and then flip it. You want to take them out when they are beginning to stiffen. So if you grab one out of the oven it will bend into an arc slightly when held in the middle, but won’t bend in half.

My directions make it sound much more complicated than it is. I just wanted to be as helpful as I could be, having made many, many batches of these crackers and coming up with helpful tips along the way.