Vegetarian « (y)our food choices™

We’re snackers. Always have been. So when a dear friend shared a batch of her sourdough crackers, we were hooked. And since our appetites for carby treats are boundless, that meant making our own at home.

The dough, on its own, produces a delicious cracker. But adding herbs and spices gives you lots of room to experiment, customizing the taste of a batch of crackers to pair with whatever works. We’ve experimented with dried herbs d’provence (a favorite), cumin and smoked paprika. We’ve also played with the fats and flours in various batches, all delicious.

Feeding a starter means discarding some of the old to make room for fresh flour. It’s a lot of starter to discard over time. Using the “throw aways” to whip up crisp, crunchy batches of crackers makes so much sense when you consider the cost of a package of specialty crackers in our local grocery stores. More than that, there is no substitute for the delicate flavors of fresh-from-the-oven anything when the alternative is something that has been packaged, shipped and displayed for weeks or months.

We’ll be sharing more of our adventures in sourdough bread making. In the meantime, we’ll just park this here in hopes it inspires you to make your own sourdough crackers. The starter couldn’t be simpler. Simply mix flour and water, cover the bowl with a clean dish towel and walk away. Time and the natural yeasts in the air will do their magic. If you want to see where our starter “recipe” comes from, check out the kitchn‘s take on the sourdough starter. We took the cracker recipe from King Arthur Flour.

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Sourdough Crackers

[Adapted from King Arthur Flour]

1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/4 cup rye flour
1/4 cup barley flour
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
1 cup unfed (“discarded”) sourdough starter
3 tablespoons unsalted butter, room temperature (or other fat like olive oil or coconut oil)
2 tablespoons dried herbs of your choice, optional (we like herbs de provence)

Oil for brushing

Course salt (such as kosher or sea salt) for sprinkling on top

Instructions

Mix together the flour, salt, sourdough starter, butter, and optional herbs to make a smooth(not sticky), cohesive dough.

Divide the dough in half, and shape each half into a small rectangular slab. Cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate for 30 minutes, or up to a couple of hours, until the dough is firm.

Preheat the oven to 400°F.

Very lightly flour a piece of parchment, your rolling pin, and the top of the dough.

Working with one piece at a time, roll the dough to about 1/16″ thick on the parchment, or basically as thin as possible. The dough will have ragged, uneven edges; that’s OK. Just try to make it as even as possible.

Transfer the dough and parchment together onto a baking sheet. Cut the dough into 1 1/4″ squares; a rolling pizza wheel and metal ruler works well here. Pull up the scrapes and wrap in plastic wrap to refrigerate for 20 minutes, then repeat the following steps above.

Prick each square with the tines of a fork.

Lightly brush with oil and then sprinkle the salt over the top of the crackers.

Bake the crackers for about 16-20 minutes, until the squares are starting to brown around the edges.

When fully browned, remove the crackers from the oven, and transfer them to a cooling rack. Store airtight at room temperature for up to a week; freeze for longer storage.

Yield: about 50-100 crackers

The first time we tasted Jackfruit we were hooked. The ripe fruit, which looks like a bunch of yellow or orange pods, taste like a mix of several fruits. It’s a clean fruit flavor, sweet but not cloyingly so. The flesh of the fruit is firm, but tender. We couldn’t resist it once we tasted it. It’s really addictive. Like crack addictive, but in a good way.

The giant, prickly jackfruit is one of the strangest things we see at our neighborhood market. Native to South Asia, the fruit can grow to nearly 100 lbs. And a single tree can produce as many as 200 jackfruit. That’s a lot of food!

Unripe jackfruit is used as a substitute for meat in curry dishes. It’s popular with vegans and other hippy types who use it to recreate a meatless version of BBQ pulled pork. Just google jackfruit pulled pork and you’ll find a plethora of videos. Most of them use the canned variety. If that’s all you can find great, but if you can find fresh, it’s worth the effort. Its subtle flavor makes it a perfect match for all kinds of spices and sauces.

Each fruit pod contains a big seed. They’re edible and they’re delicious too. Once cooked, the texture is something like a cross between potato and chestnut. Like unripe jackfruit, the seeds are used in curries. They’re great roasted or boiled. We used then in a breakfast hash and thought they were a perfect compliment to roasted potatoes, carrots, and fennel.

This is a sustainable food (at the moment) that can be produced inexpensively and as such, may be a shining spot in an otherwise challenging global food system. Buy it and you’re supporting an ecologically sound agricultural product.

Jackfruit may not be easily found outside major metro areas with large Asian communities. But if you see it, don’t let its size and exterior texture intimidate you. Take it home, cut into it, and taste what might be the “perfect” fruit flavor. Be warned, however, that the fruit releases a sticky latex sap when you cut into it. This is particularly true of green, unripe fruit. We recommend you lather on some cooking oil before handling it. Oil will clean the sticky stuff off your knives as well. The rest is easy!

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