Those were some dry sandwiches! At first, having matzos to snack on seemed special. Like being a member of some secret society. I would pull the brittle pieces out of a sandwich bag, and my non-Jewish schoolmates would ask a slew of questions. I would explain about Passover, the Seder plate, the ritual of the food, and most of all– the matzo. Biting into my “sandwich” and having it splinter and shatter into a million pieces, was part of the holiday for me. But by day three, these sandwiches got a bit old. I grew tired of the peanut butter turning entirely to glue and sticking like a retainer to the roof of my mouth.

Maybe I would have felt a little different about the whole matzos thing, if I had been eating these matzos:

Last week, Mark Bittman published this recipe for homemade olive oil matzos developed from a Sardinian flat bread called carta musica in The New York Times. It looked so simple that I decided to give it a try. Am I glad that I did! This “bread” was delicious.

Of course, being flavored with olive oil may not be the traditional thing, but this is the type of bread/cracker that I would make even if it wasn’t the Passover holiday. The olive oil makes the dough smooth and sumptuous, and it rolls out like a dream. Upon baking, the dough blisters and bubbles, giving it the airiness and crispness that true matzos has. And the flavor is unadulterated and flavorful.

Perhaps if I had known about these olive oil matzos years ago, eating a week’s worth of matzos would have been a pleasure.

Some may think of graham crackers as a childish food. And I suppose they are. I remember sitting around diminutive work tables in elementary school, with a Dixie cup full of apple juice and a teacher’s assistant placing graham crackers on the paper napkin in front of me. I loved the snack then, and I love the snack now. Graham crackers are still one of my go-to snacks when nothing else sounds good. Slathered with peanut butter, they can’t be beat. And I only could imagine that they would be superlative when homemade.

I went home, and did a quick Google search for graham cracker recipes, only to find that today’s graham crackers aren’t even made with graham flour. Sweetened with honey, and made golden with brown sugar they sounded like they were delicious biscuits, but not necessarily wheaty treats. I held the package of graham flour in my hand, dusty and the color of a morning cup of coffee with too much milk, and decided to simply substitute some of the all-purpose flour for graham flour.

They were delicious, and like I had guessed, far superior to the packaged crackers of my youth. With the addition of the graham flour, they were coarser (in a good way), and more substantial– the perfect afternoon snack. I left some plain, and dipped the rest in Belgian milk chocolate. The richness of the chocolate played nicely off of the gentle sweetness of the cracker.

The following recipe makes quite a few crackers. And the dough remains fresh in the refrigerator for quite a few days. In fact, I made two batches. The first recipe I rolled and cut by hand into more conventional rectangles. Later, I used a biscuit cutter, and made dainty circles– either way you do it is fine.

Graham Crackers
adapted from Nancy Silverton

1 1/2 cups flour
1 cup graham flour
1 cup dark brown sugar, packed lightly
1 teaspoon baking soda
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
7 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into one-inch cubes
1/3 cup honey
5 tablespoons milk
2 tablespoons vanilla extract

In the bowl of a food processor, combine flours, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt. Pulse until blended. Add the butter, and continue to pulse the food processor until a coarse meal is obtained.

In a small bowl, mix the honey, milk, and vanilla extract. Add to the flour mixture , and pulse until the dough barely comes together. The dough will be soft and quite sticky. Place on a well-floured piece of plastic wrap. Flatten the dough into a rectangle, one-inch thick. Wrap dough, and chill until firm, at least 2 hours or overnight.

Divide dough in half, and return one half to the refrigerator. On a well-floured surface, roll out the dough to 1/8 inch thick. Dough will be sticky, use plenty of flour. With a pairing knife cut rectangles 2 by 3 inches, or use a round biscuit cutter. Place crackers on a parchment-lined cookie sheet and chill dough for 15-20 minutes in the freezer. Repeat process with the other half of the dough.

Adjust the racks in the oven the upper and lower third. Preheat to 350 degrees. Remove the crackers from the refrigerator, and poke several times with a toothpick or skewer to ensure flatness of the cracker upon baking.

Bake for approximately 20 minutes, rotating the baking sheets at 10 minutes to ensure even baking. Remove from oven, and place on a rack to cool. If desired, dip cool crackers in milk chocolate, melted in a double boiler.

If the pantry were the refrigerator, surely my mother would have reprimanded me for standing in front, letting all of the cold air out. I gazed at the various packages of food for what seemed like hours. Sometimes I would have some cereal, a replay of my morning meal. At times a can of soup would tempt me. But if I spied a red box, emblazoned with the kind of mispellings that only snack foods, motels and diners can get away with, you could almost bet that a handful of Cheez-Its would become my treat du jour.

Who doesn’t love a Cheez-It? They’re salty, crispy, and well, cheese-y, and they were the snack cracker of my youth. I would plunge my little hand into that box, retrieving a handful of unnaturally orange squares just calling out to be eaten. The technicolor crumbs would settle on my fingers as I repeated this action until I had consumed enough to satiate my hunger, yet not enough to spoil my appetite for dinner.

When I saw this recipe for Parmesan Cream Crackers a few weeks back in the New York Times, and read of Mark Bittman’s childhood affection for Cheez-Its, I knew that this would be just the perfect late afternoon snack. I followed the recipe closely, and while rolling out the dough, thought to myself, “Crackers seem like such a snap, why hadn’t I made them before?” I baked them up, and Bittman’s cheese crackers were simply– meh. There was no crackle, no flakiness, no crisp texture, nothing of what I’m longing for in a snack. But they did taste cheesy, and salty– two definite pluses. The recipe just needed to be toyed with. So back to the kitchen I went.

What I came up with is in essence the same list of ingredients, just a different handling of the dough. The original recipe was similar to your basic pie crust, but in order to make a crisp, flat, cracker-like texture, the dough needed to be docked several times before baking. I rolled out the dough quite thin (1/8 inch thickness), and before scoring to make square cracker shapes, I took a fork, and poked the surface of the dough several (40-50) times. By docking, air is released from the dough in the baking process, making a thinner, flatter cracker.

The finished product was divine– crispy yet chewy, with just the right amount of salt, and a distinctly homemade character. I almost didn’t miss my Cheez-Its at all.

Homemade Cheese Crackers
loosely adapted from Mark Bittman

1 cup all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup grated cheese (I used sharp cheddar, but I imagine any strong flavored, hard cheese such as, gruyere would be excellent)
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1/4 cup half-and-half, or light cream, more if needed
Coarsely ground black pepper

Put flour, salt, cheese, and butter into the bowl of a food processor, and pulse to combine. Add the cream, and let machine run until the mixture comes together yet is not sticky.

Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface until 1/8 inch thick, using additional flour if necessary. Transfer dough to a parchment or Silpat lined baking sheet. With a fork, poke dough randomly, several (40-50) times. Score the dough to obtain 1-inch square cracker shapes. Sprinkle with pepper.

Bake at 400 degrees, for 17-20 minutes, or until lightly browned. Remove from oven, cool, and break into cracker shapes.