I bake often enough that a 1kg bag of flour creates too many trips to the supermarket. Oddly, though, it is very hard to find anything larger in the shops here. Even the hippy-dippy coop’s 5kg bags are not straight flour but things like pizza mix with built-in yeast. So I buy flour online in bulk, usually 20kg at a time; 10 strong, 5 weaker and 5 wholemeal. And although things tend to balance out, sometimes I’m stuck with a surfeit of one or the other. At the moment, it’s the weaker white flour, so I was looking through some recipes in search of inspiration. I decided to try linseed bread from Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf.

Last night – without knowing precisely what I planned to bake – I built my 100% starter, so this morning I had 160gm of nice, ripe, bubbly leaven to begin with. I did the conversions from Dan Lepard’s yeasted recipe, measured the stuff, and started to mix. But while Dan forecasts a “soft and sticky dough,” and suggests you “scrape any dough from your fingers back into the bowl,” I ended up with a very dry dough indeed. It held together, but only barely.

I tried to get a bit more water into the dough, but that is really difficult with a stiff dough. Pretty sure that I had done the conversion right, I weighed the dough. And lo! It weighed 600gm instead of the 500gm that totting up Dan’s ingredients indicated. But how? I thought back, and still can’t work it out. I couldn’t possibly have put 100 gm too much flour in. Could I? And 200 gm of linseeds instead of 100? Maybe.

Off I went for my morning constitutional, during which I decided to turn this disaster into another experiment in my cracker series. So after about three hours of rising, I rolled the dough out as thin as I could get it, using a bit of rice flour – aka baker’s Teflon – to keep things from sticking. It was down to maybe 2–3 mm, which I cut into neat shapes. Now, the tricky bit; how long, and how hot?

I put the oven on max, which is just north of 220°C, and rolled out the scraps that resulted from tidying up the edges of the crackers. That gave me four test crackers. They got 10 minutes before I took a look. They were still quite pale, and soft. I flipped them over, and gave them another 10 minutes. Maybe a little too well done. So for the first tray of crackers proper, which were definitely a bit thinner than the tests, I reduced the time to 8 minutes per side. Not bad at all. And the second batch got even less, 7 minutes a side.

Done

They were so good. Crunchy, but not tooth-breakingly so, with the nuttiness of the flax seeds and just a hint of bitterness. Magic, really.

Now all I have to work out is where I went wrong in the first place, so I can do it again.

There are so many great crispbreads in Sweden, from the very traditional round ones, still with a hole in the middle so you can thread them on a pole for winter storage, to utterly modern things studded with chia seeds. I love them all, but most of the crackery things available commercially in Rome just aren’t as good. Nor do they need to be, with great pizza bianca around the corner. So, time to make my own.

It’s been 2 1/2 years since I last tried, and that was a qualified success. So I decided to use the same recipe as before – Dark Crisp Rye Bread from Dan Lepard’s The Handmade Loaf – and adjust the cooking time down. This time I am going to give the recipe here, as I think merely discovering the correct cooking time represents an improvement.

Ingredients

100 gm rye leaven (50% hydration)
200 gm warm water
200 gm wholemeal rye flour
4gm fine salt

Method

First build the leaven. I use about 20 gm of my ordinary 100% hydration sourdough starter, mixed with 40 gm of water and 80 gm of rye flour to give a final leaven at slightly more than 50% hydration. In a small bowl mix the starter with the water first, then stir in the rye flour until you have a stiff paste. Pack that down into the bowl, cover with a plate and leave for 8–12 hours. It will puff up quite a bit.

For the dough, I used all the leaven, but you can be a stickler and weigh out 100 gm. I omit the small amount of yeast that Dan Lepard uses. Put the leaven into a large bowl, add the water and salt and break up the leaven a bit with a wooden spoon. Add the rye flour and stir until it is all incorporated and you have a somewhat sticky paste. Push it down into the bowl and smooth the top as best as you can, just to reduce the surface area so it down’t dry out too much. Cover with a damp cloth and leave in a warm place for about 3 hours.

Prepare two pieces of baking parchment, the size of your baking tray. Scrape half of the dough paste onto the centre of one of the pieces. Dust heavily with rye flour and roll out to around 0.5 cm thick. Dust with more flour if it shows the slightest sign of sticking to the rolling pin. Repeat with the other half of the dough. Cover the dough on the parchment with a dry cloth and leave in a warm place for about 2 hours. Again, the dough will puff up a little.

Preheat the oven to 220°C. Using the tip of a wet knife (to stop sticking) cut the rolled-out dough into shapes that please you. Using the end of a wooden spoon handle, poke the surface all over to create dimples. Slide the parchment directly onto your baking stone (if you have one) or onto a baking tray and bake for about 25 minutes, checking to see that they aren’t burning.

At that point I took the crackers from the oven, allowed them to cool for a minute or two, then broke them up and left them on a wire rack to cool. They were very good, at least on the first night, but by the next day I confess that things were not as I had hoped. The thicker crackers, especially, had become almost impossibly hard and tooth-threatening. I think the problem is that the inside was still somewhat moist, and some process as yet unknown to me had overnight rendered the entire cracker almost unchewable. Once chewed, they were still delicious, but not for the weak.

May I be excused a bit of doggerel?

“You are old,” said the youth, “and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak –
Pray how did you manage to do it?”

“In my youth,” said his father, “I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength, which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life.”

Anyway, I put the crackers in a very low oven for half an hour and then left them there with the door open for another couple of hours, and that seems to have dried them out to the point where they are crisp but not hard. Does that make sense?

I’m determined to keep trying. We had so many great, different crackers in Sweden, many with whole seeds pressed into the surface, that I want to recreate here. And I’m wondering, would a pasta machine be able to handle such a dough, to get the really thin crackers? I plan to find out.