How To Make Cheddar Cheese Crackers

Cheese crackers, whether they are square or shaped like an animal, are highly snackable. They’re tender and crisp, a little buttery, and bursting with cheese flavor. Replicating these snack staples can be disappointing, as my 5-year-old told me often during attempt after attempt to make her beloved “cheddar bunnies” at home.

It wasn’t until I started adding cheddar cheese powder to a basic cheese cracker recipe and leaving the baked crackers in the oven to dry overnight, that I finally got my long-awaited thumbs-up of approval.

There are so many cheese crackers on the market that it’s important to get this cleared up right away. This crispy cheddar cheese cracker can be baked up into a tiny cracker or a square. The tiny animal-shaped crackers will puff in the oven and come out much like Goldfish crackers, while the squares are a little heartier and snack more like a Cheez-It.

• For ultimate cheesiness, this recipe calls for 6 ounces sharp cheddar cheese and 1/4 cup cheddar cheese powder. You can order cheese powder here.
• The crackers bake at 350°F for about 10 minutes, depending on their size.
• Make sure you’ve got parchment paper on hand for rolling and baking.

Here’s the trouble with adding cheese to a cracker dough: Cheese is a wet ingredient, full of flavorful fat. When baked, the cheese oozes out some of its flavor and can help crisp the crackers (with the fat) or make them soggy (if the moisture isn’t drawn out). Two things will combat the cheese’s natural tendency to soften the crackers: Cheese powder and an overnight “dry” in the oven.

Cheese powder is dried and pulverized cheese. It absorbs the fresh cheese’s moisture and pumps up the cheesy flavor. You can skip it, but don’t expect a strong cheese flavor — and increasing the fresh cheese will just result in a greasy cracker.

So, you bake up these cheese crackers and they will be delicious out of the oven, but leave them out too long and they will get soft — even baking them to perfectly golden-brown won’t dry them completely. So here’s the trick: Once you’ve got all the crackers baked, remove them from the oven, then turn the oven off for at least an hour. Once it’s cooled down, stick the cheese crackers back in the oven overnight (8 hours is just right). The low temp of the oven will drive out moisture and keep the crackers crisp.

• Use your food processor: You can use your food processor for both grating the cheese and making the cracker dough if you switch from the grating disk to the blade. You can also totally make this dough with a box grater for the cheese and mixing the dough by hand — just work quickly to keep everything cool.
• Keep things cold: Roll out the dough, then chill; it will roll out more easily and chill faster.
• Re-rolling is good! Cut the crackers to desired shapes, and re-roll and cut more crackers until all of the dough is used. The last few crackers won’t be tough — in fact they tend to puff a little more.
• Choose your shape: You can use a cute little cookie cutter for making shapes, or use a pizza cutter to make squares. For full Cheez-It effect, use a skewer to make an indent in the middle of the square. This helps them bake more evenly.
• Crowding the pan is OK! The crackers won’t spread in the oven, so feel free to get them as close together as you like. Once the crackers are baked, let them cool at room temperature for an hour while the oven cools, and then you can consolidate the crackers onto fewer baking sheets to dry them in the oven.

To make sure your crispy crackers stay crispy and delicious, store them in an airtight container in the pantry. They will stay crisp for at least a week in an airtight container, or longer. Hard to say, since they don’t last long in my house.