Some of my favorite Great British Bake Off episodes are the ones where they make crackers. But they aren’t called crackers – they call them biscuits. To me, a biscuit is a warm soft doughy thing that I would eat hot out of the oven with butter. Or with my mothers white sausage gravy….which is awesome. But if you search up UK Biscuits – you get a whole bunch of pictures of things I would normally call cookies.
So, biscuits are cookies, but in this particular episode they looked like crackers. Nancy, for example, made rye and fennel biscuits. How is that not a cracker?? Either way – today we’re going to attempt cheese straws. Which I guess could be considered a cracker, or a biscuit, depending on where you come from. But it’s definitely not a cookie.
Let’s Cook
This recipe kills me. Yes, it’s easy to read and the ingredients are clear – but there is still so much left unsaid. Do I use a dash of paprika, Worcestershire AND cayenne….or do I pick one of the three? Also, important to note here that I measured out 1/4 teaspoon of all three of those things before I read the recipe again and noticed the word DASH. 1/4 of teaspoon of CAYENNE in these things would have killed me.
After I’ve blended well, how do I cut into strips? I assume I roll it out and then cut – but how long? How thin should I make it? One would assume that the thickness of dough would be important here. At the very least tell me how many are supposed to be made from this recipe. That would give me an idea of how thin.
Bringing all the ingredients together was easy enough. I plopped everything in the stand mixer and left it to do it’s thing. Once it was a big mush of crap I rolled it out and used a pizza cutter to cut strips.
The first batch I left as just plain straight lines, but the second batch I made fancy and twirled the strands to make them pretty. We’ll find out later that it was a mistake to do that.
End Result
They tasted like burnt cheez-its. But they did taste like cheez-its. If the cheez-it was the desired taste for these, than I definitely achieved that. As you can see, baking the twirly fancy ones for the same amount of time as the straight ones was a mistake. Just a tad too much on the side of burnt.
Also, if you breathe on theses damn things too hard they will break. I lost half of them just by putting them in a pretty crystal glass for the picture.
I imagine you could play around a lot with this recipe. Add different flavorings or even go crazy with some interesting cheeses. Get a super small cutter and actually make your own cheez-its! I have no idea if that’s cost effective or not though – and during this crazy time, the price of cheese is important. You can call them Artisan Cheez-Its.
