Baking Crackers

Think about a nice, creamy pat of butter, sitting on a freshly baked, homemade cracker!  Is your mouth watering yet?  There is a surprising amount of science to be found in the kitchen, so let’s take a look and see what we can learn!

​You can also make your own butter to put on your crackers!

what you'll need

• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 1/4 cup water
• 1 tablespoon honey
• Mixing bowl
• Measuring cups and spoons
• Butter knife and spoon
• Cookie or baking sheet
• Rolling pin (optional)
• Oven and Hot pads

experimental procedure

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.  Then,
2. Put 1 1/4 cups of flour in the big bowl.  Be sure to fill the cup up to the proper mark, and then level it off, because if we use too much flour, the dough will not stick together.
3. Cut up the butter into little pieces, and drop it in the flour.
4. Use your hands to squish the flour and the butter together, until the mixture is crumbly.  The smaller the chunks of butter are, the better the crackers will be.
5. Add the water and the honey.  Squish the mixture around again.  You want to end up with a squishy, sticky ball of dough with very few (if any) recognizable lumps of butter in it.
6. Dust your cookie sheet with a little bit of flour (less than ¼ cup).  Also, put some flour on your hands, and rub your hands over the rolling pin, if you are using one.
7. Put the dough on the cookie sheet and smush it down flat with your hands.  If you are using a rolling pin, use it to roll out the dough so it is very flat.  When you smush the dough straight down with your hands, you should barely feel it move.
8. Cut the dough into shapes (squares, rectangles, triangles, etc.) with the butter knife.
9. Have a grown up put the cookie sheet in the oven, and set the timer for ten minutes.
10. After 10 minutes, have a grown up take the cookie sheet out of the oven, and let the crackers cool.  They will not be very crispy at first, but they will get a little more crispy as they cool and dry.​
    

what's happening

Let’s take a closer look at our crackers.  Do they look poofy at all to you?  Or are they pretty flat?  They should be flat, because we didn’t add any leavening to them.  Leavening is the cooking term for any ingredient that will make things that you bake poofy.  Things like baking powder and baking soda make bread and cakes rise because they react with other ingredients in the dough to make carbon dioxide bubbles.  The holes that we see when we look at a piece of bread are the outsides of those carbon dioxide bubbles.  The carbon dioxide escapes into the air, and we have a delicious piece of bread.  However, in this case, we didn’t want the crackers to be poofy, so we didn’t put anything in that would make the bubbles.  So, our crackers should be flat and delicious!
​

variations and related activities

Coming soon.

references and links to more information

Coming soon.

Subject Tags
​

• Food Chemistry
• Kitchen Science​

All Chemistry Subject Tags

All
Acid/Base Chemistry
Bubbles
Crystals
Density
Food Chemistry
Heat/Cold
Kitchen Science
Milk Chemistry
Oils
Phase/State Changes
Polymers
Soap
Water

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