Homemade Ritz Crackers

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As you can imagine, I’m the type of girl who was pretty excited to discover that someone had gone to the work of testing and coming up with a Ritz cracker recipe.  Ritz crackers are something I’ve wanted to recreate, being a favorite here at our house, though we don’t buy them often.  Making a knock-off at home would be awesome!  I really appreciate  Stef over at Cupcake Project, for her many (many) trial runs in developing the recipe I launched from here.

Still though, the question was, it works with fresh butter…but could it be successfully “food storage-ized”??

I tried out the recipe with my tried and trusty Thrive butter powder and thought the crackers were good.  They tasted like Ritz, although denser, and not flakey.  To determine what people (outside of my family) thought of this version, I decided to try them out on the first 10 adults I found while dropping my kids off to scouts and church youth group.  I needed some feedback if I were going to ask you to trust me on it.  The response I got was that (happily) every person — 10 out of 10 — who tried them said they liked them.  (Woo hoo — success!!)

While the testers noticed the texture is different than Ritz, not flakey, which I knew (some called it “thicker”, others said “heartier”) because the flavor was still good, they didn’t seem to mind.  “I don’t mind the texture being different because the taste makes up for it” said one taster.  “I could eat these all the time!” said another.  So the food storage swap worked.  Here’s to another cracker recipe!

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makes about 80 crackers

Ingredients:

2 cups all purpose flour, plus more for dusting

3 tsp. baking powder

1 TBS sugar

1/4 cup +2 TBS butter powder, as well as 3 TBS for topping

1/2 (heaping) tsp. salt, + 1 1/2 tsp salt for topping

2 TBS vegetable oil

3/4 cup water, + 3 TBS for topping

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Tools and Supplies:

Pasta Maker (to make the dough all of one thickness and making the job much easier)

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Instructions:

Whisk together the dry ingredients and combine with water and oil.  Knead the shaggy dough until it forms a ball.  Dust with flour and divide into four segments.  Roll each segment flat to a 1/8″ thickness with a rolling pin or pass through a pasta machine pressed to gauge #4.  Cut with a fluted biscuit cutter for a traditional cracker shape (or any shape you want) and poke holes in the dough.  The holes can be made in the Ritz pattern (or any pattern you like).  Keep in mind that the holes are not just decorative; they help the crackers to bake correctly – so be sure to poke some.

Bake on parchment paper at 400 degrees for 11 minutes or until lightly browned.  Remove from oven and brush the top of each cracker with a mixture of 2 TBS water, 2 TBS butter powder and 1 tsp. salt.  Lightly sprinkle salt over top (optional, though we agreed the additional sprinkling of salt tasted better) and flip each cracker over.  Now, brush the underside of the crackers with the butter/salt mixture, and return to the oven to bake again for 5-6 minutes, until evenly browned.  Cool completely and enjoy.

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I just used the end of a wooden skewer to poke the holes.  Due to the baking powder in the dough, the holes need to be larger (or they’ll close up upon baking), anything that makes a good hole will do.

After the first bake…

Flip the crackers over to brush again, then return to the oven.

Cool completely and enjoy!

One of the groups of testers I approached.  I thought they might like a snack, and they did!

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Notes:

• This recipe, being dependent on a good butter powder, reinforces that Thrive’s butter powder is really top notch.  (And btw, I’m not being paid by Thrive in any way to say that, I just like and respect a good product when I find one.)  In fact, beyond the dough itself, I tested out a couple of different “butter powder/ butter flavoring” options for the butter/salt topping only to return again to Thrive’s product, which ended up tasting best in finishing off the cracker.

• The biscuit cutters I used can be found here.

• While it wouldn’t be the ideal, I’m sure these could totally be made in a sun oven.  You’d want to prop the door with a pencil (for the steam to escape), most likely need to extend the cooking time (to twice the amount of time) and just be prepared that you might not get the same browning you see here.

• I tried a variety of different dough thicknesses before choosing which one to go with.  Here’s how each thickness turned out, beginning from the top we have a pasta maker #2 gauge (cookie like), #3 gauge, #4 gauge (the one we liked the best), #5 and #6.  The thinner ones were crispy but very unlike Ritz, more like wheat thins or saltines.  They also seemed to bake more unevenly.