S'mores Part I: The Graham Cracker

This actually started from a desire to feed my son good snack food. The fact that it has become the base for the best s'mores ever is a bonus. More on the s'mores later, I promise.

After my (sort of) success making cheese crackers, I thought I'd try a sweeter cracker. He loves graham crackers, but like most processed food, it has HFCS in it, along with all sorts of other undesirable ingredients.

I remembered that I had seen a show on the food network a while ago on how to make graham crackers, so I did a little search and found Alton Brown's recipe for graham crackers. The recipe calls for graham flour. A simple internet search revealed that graham flour is just whole wheat flour. The flour that I found was just labeled as whole wheat, but on the back was printed the story of graham flour.

The other sort of strange ingredient was aluminum free baking powder. I was almost out of baking powder anyways, so I went to the store and picked up this brand, which is pretty widely available.

Luckily, I have a kitchen scale, as Alton tends to give dry measurements in ounces rather than cups. I measured out the flours, baking soda, brown sugar (I used light brown), salt, and cinnamon.

I threw it in my food processor along with the butter. I processed it until the butter was evenly distributed.

I added milk, honey (the recipe calls for molases, but I'm not a big fan of the flavor of molasses, and I knew honey would taste delicious), and vanilla and processed for about a minute. At this point, it holds together in a ball. I pressed the dough into a disk and wrapped it in plastic wrap to put in the fridge for 30 minutes.

After chilling, I rolled the dough out between 2 pieces of parchment paper. I rolled it super thin. Probably about 1/8 of an inch. I didn't want the crackers to be chewy, but crispy.

After rolling, I cut it into about 2 inch squares using a pizza cutter, then pricked each cracker with a fork.

This recipe made a little over 2 pans of graham crackers. The recipe says to bake for 25 minutes, but maybe I rolled them too thin, because mine were ready before 15 minutes. I cut through them again right after they came out of the oven, because I was afraid that they woulnd't break apart. After about 10 minutes, I was able to break them into perfect little squares.

Perfect little yummy squares.

Perfect little yummy bases for s'mores. But more on that later.