Do you like to crunch? I know for Ellen, it isn’t a full meal unless there is something crunchy with the meal. I am not talking about celery. Yes, it is crunchy and crunch lovers trying to be healthy try really hard to convince themselves that celery is meeting their crunch need. But deep down in our not-so-secret crunch satisfaction centers in the brain, celery only scores a 2 out of ten on the satisfaction scale.
A 10 out of 10 is something like Doritos chips, or Ritz crackers, or Lay’s potato chips. A good proper crunch includes generous amounts of satisfying salt, fat, and starchiness. The “health food” marketers have a field day with this one – inventing a story book full of lies to convince you that getting your chips and crackers made out of organic potatoes or blue corn or mixing in minute amounts of vegetables will somehow make the “healthy” chips, deep fried in vegetable oil, magically less toxic. Sorry, any time you deep-fry any starch of any kind in polyunsaturated oil it becomes very toxic. It makes no difference at all that indigenous tribes organically grow the starch in the high Peruvian Andes.
But we love crunchy, starchy, greasy, salty snacks. For the last several years I have reached for raw, but lightly salted mixed nuts as the crunchy snack of choice. Ellen’s favorite (read addiction) is pistachios. I tend more towards almonds and a few cashews. I like to soak the almonds over night and change the water a couple times before “baking” them at a low temperature in the oven with a light sprinkle of flavored sea salt for a day. The soaking removes most of the natural toxic elements in the outer skin of the nut that Mother Nature puts there to discourage insects from eating the nuts.
The problem with nuts is that they are really filling very quickly. They are very nutrient dense and high in calories, so by the time the craving for crunch is over, I have over eaten and now feel overly full.
A couple years ago I would make up a savory Dr Dave Miracle Bread and slice it into very thin slices and then dry the slices in my food dehydrator. This makes a very nice crunchy cracker, but lately I have been bored with that crunch. So last week I created a lovely variation on my flax cracker recipe, which I have dubbed Pizza Cracker!
So how do we make Pizza Crackers?
Start with a couple cups of flax meal and a heaping cup of almond flour. Flax meal is used in allergy recipes as an egg replacement, so we are not going to use any eggs in this recipe. This makes the final crackers able to stay out in a cookie jar on the counter without going bad for a long time.
For the most basic boring cracker, you could simply add a teaspoon of salt and a cup of water and call it good, but what fun would that be? So I add a quarter cup of dried onion flakes and a big pinch of Italian seasoning, followed by about a teaspoon of garlic salt to the dry ingredients. To this mixture I add a 13.5 ounce jar of gluten free organic pizza sauce, and a couple tablespoons of avocado oil. Simply using a big wooden spoon I mix this all up until it forms a nice ball of dough.
Next comes the pizza step. To the ball of dough I add half a bag (4 ounces) of Daiya Mozzarella or Cheddar shredded pretend cheese and mix it in. I could also add diced up pepperoni at this point, but I haven’t gone that far yet. If you have no issues with dairy products, you could add real cheese. However, if you are gluten intolerant then you are also dairy intolerant. Dairy protein looks like gluten to our immune system.
Now comes the fun part. Lay out a sheet of parchment paper on the counter big enough to cover a baking sheet pan. Put a ball of half your dough in the center of the paper and then cover the ball and paper with a sheet of plastic wrap the same size as the parchment paper. Use a rolling pin to flatten out the dough to about a 1/8th inch thickness. Then peel off the plastic wrap and slide the parchment paper with the flattened dough on it onto the baking sheet.
Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
Use a pizza cutter to cut the dough into cracker-sized pieces and sprinkle chia seeds and a little extra garlic salt over the top. You could also use sesame seeds or even poppy seeds.
Repeat this same process for the other half of the dough and put it onto a second baking sheet. By now the oven should be hot so pop the sheets into the oven and bake for around 20 to 25 minutes. You want to see the edges starting to get brown.
When they are done, pull them out of the oven and let them cool. In my experience these are lovely still warm from the oven – soft and chewy. To get them really crisp without burning them, I then use the pizza cutter to re-score the crackers where I originally cut them and then load all the crackers (minus the ones we ate while still warm) into our dehydrator for a day. If you don’t have a dehydrator, just separate the crackers, turn them over, and put them back into the oven at around 150 degrees for several hours to get them good and crisp. Cool and store in an airtight container.
These crackers are so delicious with our bone broth vegetable soup each day. Be careful, they can be addictive. That is not such a bad thing as flax is mostly beneficial fiber, but it does have unnecessary calories – temperance in all things.