{"id":4525,"date":"2012-10-15T00:09:48","date_gmt":"2012-10-15T04:09:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/?p=4525"},"modified":"2012-12-23T22:47:04","modified_gmt":"2012-12-24T03:47:04","slug":"home-made-cheez-its","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/2012\/10\/15\/home-made-cheez-its\/","title":{"rendered":"Home-Made Cheez-Its"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center><\/p>\n<table cellpadding=1>\n<tr>\n<td bgcolor=\"black\"><a href=\"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/gallery\/v\/food\/IMG_7116.jpg.html?g2_imageViewsIndex=2\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/gallery\/d\/102620-2\/IMG_7116.jpg\" height=427 width=640 border=0 title=\"Home-made Cheez-It-like cheese crackers.\"><\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n<p><\/center><\/p>\n<p>Yesterday afternoon I came across <a href=\"http:\/\/prudentbaby.com\/2012\/06\/entertaining-food\/quick-easy-homemade-ceeze-it-recipe\/\">this post about making home-made Cheez-It-like crackers<\/a> on LiveJournal. Since they sounded good and we had all the ingredients around the I went ahead and made some. It took about five minutes to make the dough then 10-15 to cut them out. After this they baked for 18-20 minutes until they were done.<\/p>\n<p>Brief recipe is as follows:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Combine the following ingredients in a food processor and process until crumbly:<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>8 oz. Shredded Cheddar<\/li>\n<li>1 cup All-Purpose Flour<\/li>\n<li>4 tbsp. room-temp Salted Butter (Use 1\/2 tsp. of salt if using unsalted butter.)<\/li>\n<li>1\/2 tsp. Smoked Paprika<\/li>\n<li>1\/4 tsp. Ground Mustard<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<li>After completely integrated, drizzle in 2 tbsp. of tap water and process more so it forms a dough.<\/li>\n<li>Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and put in the fridge for 20 minutes.<\/li>\n<li>Lay the dough between two pieces of plastic wrap and roll thin; perhaps 5mm thick.<\/li>\n<li>Cut the dough into rough squares with a pizza cutter.<\/li>\n<li>Poke small holes in the center of each piece of dough with a round toothpick with the end cut flat.<\/li>\n<li>Transfer to a parchment-lined baking sheet.<\/li>\n<li>Sprinkle with flaked salt. I used a flaked Spanish sea salt.<\/li>\n<li>Bake at ~375\u00b0F until golden brown. This took me almost 20 minutes. (If underdone the centers will be soft and they won&#8217;t be very good.)<\/li>\n<li>Cool, transfer to an air tight container for storage.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>These are very, very good. They are similar to Cheez-Its in that they are snack crackers, but they taste much better and don&#8217;t have that odd vomit-like smell familiar to anyone who has opened a new box of the Nabisco product.<\/p>\n<p><strong>UPDATE \/ Lessons Learned:<\/strong> The second time I made these I did a couple things differently which made it much easier, and they came out quite a bit better (<a href=\"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/gallery\/v\/food\/IMG_7189.jpg.html\">photo of the second batch<\/a>):<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li> I split the dough into two halves, rolled the halves out separately, and baked each half in a separate pan. This gave me much more room to work and allowed me to roll the dough thinner making them more properly cracker-like.\n<li> When rolling out the dough I put some thin bamboo skewers down next to the dough and used this as a spacer for the rolling pin. This allowed for all the crackers to be a consistent thickness.\n<li> Dough was cut into 1&#8243; squares for consistency in baking.\n<li> After cutting the dough into squares I inverted the cookie sheet over it, then flipped the whole assembly over. Don&#8217;t bother separating the dough squares, this can be done later.\n<li> Part-way through baking use a spatula to separate the partially-crunchy squares, shake to distribute them throughout the pan, and continue baking. This is much easier than trying to separate the squares when putting them on the pan.\n<li> Be sure to bake any mis-shapen trimming pieces from the edges. They are just as good, but know that they&#8217;ll cook faster.\n<li> Err on the side of over baking. Slightly browned crackers are better than chewy ones.<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday afternoon I came across this post about making home-made Cheez-It-like crackers on LiveJournal. Since they sounded good and we had all the ingredients around&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/2012\/10\/15\/home-made-cheez-its\/\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Home-Made Cheez-Its<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-food","category-making-things","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4525"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17002,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4525\/revisions\/17002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}