What Polly Wants:

OMG Crackers with Chernuska seeds

This past July I had the opportunity of attending The Kneading Conference in Skowhegen, Maine. There I was privileged to attend many workshops, the best two of which were led by Naomi Duguid. Duguid is a flatbread-maker extraordinaire. Her work has inspired many meals in my house, including simple sip-the-soup-and-crunch-the-cracker affairs. 

The workshops: Artisinal Crackers and Using The Tandoor, produced foods I could not eat (The Kneading Conference was a wheat-eater affair) but I learned a tremendous amount - including that my OMG Flatbread mix could be used to make breads that "work" in a Tandoor.

The column and recipe below were published in my e-newsletter before I ever went to Maine, but as summer ends and I look back over its significant events I can't resist reprinting it here.

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Creating crackers was never part of my summer program. After coming up with a flatbread that could be made on stove top or outdoor grill, I figured the test kitchen was closed until mid-August, when I'd put finishing touches on a Back-To-School bread. But if the forces of the universe conspire, you've gotta follow.

In early June I was lounging on the couch reading Diane Morgan's excellent cookbook, Roots, and discovered that if I wanted to make a classic Peruvian hot sauce for South American style potatoes (I did), I needed to use saltine crackers. Of course this got me thinking: Was there a gluten-free equivalent? I'd never tasted one.

A few days later, while picnicking with friends Sara and Claude, Sara began rhapsodizing about crackers. She doesn't suffer from celiac disease, so no grain is off-limits, but she'd just tasted a flatbread made from my OMG Flatbread mix and was certain it could make a great cracker.

And then I recalled how my wife Leslie preferred the baking experiments I rejected as too thin and crunchy. Yes, the universe was telling me something.

Digging into cookbooks I soon came up with a half-dozen good-sounding cracker recipes. Eliminating all but the easiest reduced the field to one: Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid's rye cracker recipe, in their massive and wonderful volume, Home Baking. I didn't want to make my crackers with rye, of course, but I was sure the basic formula would work with OMG Flatbread flour, and it did.

You couldn't find an easier recipe than this. One needs only butter, sugar, salt, rice flour for dusting and some OMG Flatbread mix. You can complicate things if you wish with spices like Charnushka (to me this is an ingredient well worth finding), but the hardest part of making these crackers is tolerating oven heat on a summer day.

A thought on this: I suspect crackers can be made in a toaster oven or even a BBQ with a pizza stone and a lid. I never got around to trying, but if one of you does, kindly let me know how it works.

OMG Crackers

Yield: about 30, 2-inch-square crackers

Ingredients:
1/2 cup OMG Flatbread flour mix 
1/8 tsp granulated sugar
1 TBLS unsalted butter
1/4 cup warm water - 100 - 115F
About 2 TBLS white rice dusting flour
Coarse salt to sprinkle on cracker surface
(optional) Charnushka - available at Savory Spice Shop

You will also need:
Medium bowl
Whisk, stirring spoon or fork
Large work surface or cutting board
Pizza stone or cookie sheet
Rolling pin or empty cylindrical bottle
Sharp knife or pizza wheel cutter
Water spritzer (you can dip your fingers in a bowl and flick the water if you don't have a spritzer)
Cooling rack

Procedure:
Optional first step: Using an immersion blender or small food processor, process flour mix for 1 minute, or until very fine.

• Using a medium bowl, add flour and sugar and whisk to blend. Cut butter into lima-bean-sized chunks. Toss into flour/sugar blend and rub in with fingertips until mixture has the texture of coarse sand. Add water and stir to mix. Let stand about 5 minutes, then beat dough vigorously until it is smooth - 50 or more strokes. (A power mixer may be used.)

• Thoroughly dust a work surface or large cutting board (It must be at least 12" X 16"). Turn dough out onto dusted surface and sprinkle dough with dusting flour. Pat and shape dough into a rectangle that is about 6" X 8", turning and dusting frequently. Dust a rolling pin or cylindrical bottle and roll dough very thin. (see photo). Using a pizza cutter or sharp knife, cut dough into rectangles or squares. Prick surface with tines of a fork. Cover with plastic wrap or a dry towel and put in a warm-ish place to rise.

• Heat oven to 425 F. If you have a pizza stone, use it. A heavy cookie sheet works well too. If your cutting board is plastic you'll need to transfer the crackers to a flat, heat-proof surface, such as a peel or a flat cookie sheet and then tip or slide crackers onto hot stone/cookie sheet. If the cutting board is wood, gently brush away excess flour and then tip the crackers onto the hot stone/cookie sheet in the oven. Spritz them lightly with water and sprinkle with salt and/or charnushka.

• Bake 10 minutes or until slightly browned (see photo at top of this page). It's a good idea to turn the pizza stone or cookie sheet 180 degrees halfway through, but be very careful moving a hot stone. Remove crackers to a rack to cook. They should be cool enough to eat in 10 minutes. Sit down in front of the tube, boot up an old episode of Dr. Who, and try not to eat every last one!

Legacies

New Italian bread. Legacy-worthy?

So here it is July 1 and no bread business yet. I’m getting closer, but nothing is showing. At least not in the facility I’ve rented - which sits waiting in the summer sun for the township building department to cough up a permit for my three-part sink. Once they do, things should move. And show. And if you like photos of plumbers at work, I’ll have some.

In the meantime you’ll hopefully content yourself with a look at my updated website: HERE. As you can see I'm trying to keep things simple - bread mixes and nothing but, and just two, at least for the time being. 

There’s one thing troubling me. It should be the same thing troubling anyone starting a gluten-free business:  What if the whole gluten-free diet craze collapses before my business gets off the ground.

A morning's work.

It’s a reasonable fear. That the GF diet has “craze” or “fad” elements is, I think, beyond dispute. Recently I saw a study that indicated only 10% of shoppers buying GF goods had celiac disease or gluten insensitivity. When 90% of buyers are purchasing foods that have no proven benefit, it’s a fad. 

To misquote Andy Warhol, fads have a life span of only 15 minutes. With consumers spending about $6 billion in gluten-free goods in fiscal 2011, my guess is that we’re well past minute 7.5. Which means, the fad is on its way out.

You can see this already in the fringes. The hair shirt crowd has decided that giving up gluten isn’t enough, and are demanding their followers give up all grains. (They call this the Paleo diet. Mastodon for dinner, anyone?) And sugar - “usual suspect” #1 whenever a pleasure-giving substance needs beaten up - is re-appearing in TV shows and web blasts as Evil Incarnate, shoving gluten aside. 

So why, given this trajectory, go into a gluten-free business at all? My answer: legacy. 

The ultimate contribution we in GF foods will make is not health but the introduction of new and wonderful flavors to the world’s palate. 

micro-pies with rice-flour-almond crust

I know this is hard to believe. GF has the (well-earned) reputation for producing foods that only a desperate soul would consume. Anyone who received a celiac disease diagnosis 5 or more years ago is familiar with the genre. Crackers that punished the teeth. Door-stop bread. Cakes that dissolved into powder. 

These products linger, but they’re now the minority. We who must eat gluten-free have as many tasty, healthy and easy-to-find dining options as those with normal digestive systems. Some baking and cooking professionals have even risen to that old art-school slogan, “Good Enough Never Is” and decided that “As good-tasting as wheat” is not what’s needed; gluten-free must be more.

Beyond the tired old ways of making things with wheat flour, gluten-free is inspiring new options, new tastes. Consider: before the GF craze, who outside of Ethiopia had ever heard of teff, let alone tasted it? Has any wheat-flour baker tweaked spicy flavors from pie crust, without adding spices? We who are gluten-free can smilingly say, “We have!” 

Wheat-based bakers primarily rely on three grains. Gluten-free bakers use at least eight (millet, sorghum, corn, buckwheat, rice, teff, amaranth, quinoa), and that’s not counting the varieties within each family (ie: dark teff, ivory teff, red teff). Plus we augment our flours with many starches. In both categories we’ve introduced flavors previously unknown in our cultures. 

Not wheat but sourdough nonetheless. Whole grain and good!

Our legacy is with breads that are astonishingly good and taste nothing like wheat breads, in cakes and cookies and pies that delight the tastebuds with lush and interesting new flavors, in crackers with luscious chew and flatbreads that combine crunch and moist in unexpected yet wonderful ways.

Which is why I’m opening my gluten-free business. I think my breads will fill the bill. Egotistic? Perhaps. But I won’t claim to be the only one inventing legacy foods. Next time you’re the supermarket, pick up a bag of Bob’s Red Mill quinoa flour and try the chocolate cupcake recipe on the back. If those aren’t gluten-free cakes worth legacy status, I don’t know what is.

And for those of you with a love of experiment and a family willing to lap up your trial recipes, here’s two ideas I’m sure can be molded into legacies. I’ve put them aside in favor of breads, but I know that someone - maybe YOU, gentle reader - can do wonders with them.

Fresh red raspberries and buckwheat kernels, ready for the kitchen.

1) Buckwheat and raspberries

2) Ivory teff and seafood.

And there, I’m out of ideas for another round of writing. When next I sit at this keyboard I hope to have business progress to report. In my world the installation of a three-part sink is the most yearned-for of events.