A thin sheet of golden, blistered olive oil cracker broken into long shards on parchment, flecked with flaky salt and rosemary, a bowl of green olives and a wedge of hard cheese beside it

Olive Oil Crackers, Rolled Thin and Baked Hot

Published 25 Sep 202610 min read

A cracker is flour, fat and salt with the water baked out. That makes it the one piece of baking with no leavening to fail and nowhere to hide, and the dough to learn first. It takes five ingredients the pantry already holds: flour, extra virgin olive oil, a splash of dry white wine, water and salt. Knead it for two minutes and rest it for half an hour. Roll it until the counter nearly shows through, prick it all over with a fork, and bake it hot until it blisters and snaps. The wine comes from Puglia. There the tarallo, the region's ring-shaped cracker, has been made from flour, extra virgin olive oil and white wine for long enough to earn a place on the regional register of traditional foods. What comes out of the oven is a crisp, lean, lightly salted surface that carries a cheese and tastes of the oil in the dough. The crackers guide maps the families, and how to buy crackers reads the box. This page is the dough itself.

Ingredients, for two sheets

250 g (2 cups) all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon (5 g) fine sea salt
60 ml (1/4 cup) extra virgin olive oil, plus a little for brushing. It is the only fat, so it is the flavor
60 ml (1/4 cup) dry white wine
60 to 75 ml (1/4 to 1/3 cup) water, room temperature. Start with the smaller amount. Flour kept in Denver's dry air tends to need the full amount
Flaky sea salt, for the top
Optional: 1 teaspoon chopped rosemary, nigella seed or fennel pollen

Method

Mix. Whisk the flour and fine salt in a bowl. Add the olive oil, the wine and 60 ml of the water, and stir with a fork until the dough is shaggy and no dry flour is left in the bottom of the bowl.
Knead briefly. Knead in the bowl or on a clean counter for two to three minutes, until the dough is smooth, firm and not sticky, about as firm as cold modeling clay. If it cracks and crumbles, add the remaining water a teaspoon at a time. Do not flour the counter. The oil in the dough keeps it from sticking.
Rest. Cover the dough with the upturned bowl or a sheet of plastic and leave it at room temperature for 30 minutes. Straight after kneading, the dough fights the pin and shrinks back after every pass. After half an hour it rolls out thin and stays put.
Heat the oven and the sheet. Heat the oven to 450°F (230°C) with a baking sheet turned upside down on the middle rack. The hot sheet works like a baking stone. The bottom of the cracker sets on contact and crisps from below while the top dries.
Roll thin. Divide the dough in half and keep one half covered. Roll the other half directly on a sheet of parchment the size of your baking sheet, from the center outward, turning the parchment a quarter turn every few passes. Aim for about 1.5 mm, roughly two credit cards stacked. At that thickness the grain of a wooden counter or the pattern of the parchment starts to show through. An irregular shape is fine. Even thickness is not optional, because thick spots stay soft and thin spots burn.
Top and dock. Brush the sheet very lightly with olive oil and scatter flaky salt and the rosemary, nigella or fennel pollen. Press them in with one pass of the pin. Then prick the whole sheet with a fork every 2 cm, all the way to the edges. For neat crackers, cut squares or diamonds with a pizza wheel now. For shards, leave the sheet whole and break it after baking.
Bake hot. Slide the parchment onto the hot sheet and bake 8 to 12 minutes. Take it out when the surface is covered in small blisters, the edges are a deep gold and the center is dry and pale gold with no soft, translucent patches. The edges finish first, so lift off any pieces that are done and put the rest back for a minute or two.
Cool, then repeat. Move the crackers to a rack. They are slightly flexible when hot and crisp fully as they cool, so judge them cold. Roll and bake the second half. Once they are completely cold, store them airtight.

The half-docked sheet

The fork holes are the one piece of real technique, and one sheet shows what they do. The first time, dock only half the sheet. As the dough heats, the water in it turns to steam. The surface dries faster than the middle and forms a skin, which traps the steam. On the undocked half the trapped steam pushes the top away from the bottom into hollow pillows. The patents that describe industrial cracker lines call this pillowing. The fork holes let the steam out, and they are thought to pin the two surfaces together at close intervals, so the docked half bakes flatter and more even, with small blisters instead of large ones. Seeds and coarse herbs may help a little too. Cracker patents describe properly sized seeds and herbs mixed into a dough opening small channels for the steam. The undocked half comes out as a puffed, hollow flatbread that shatters at the first bite and is good with a dip. It just is not a cracker.

Why it went wrong

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Dough shrinks back as it is rolled	The gluten has not relaxed yet	Cover it and wait ten more minutes, then roll again
Dough cracks and crumbles at the edges	Too little water. Flour stored in dry air absorbs more	Knead in water a teaspoon at a time until smooth
Big hollow pillows	Steam trapped under a dry skin	Dock every 2 cm, all the way to the edges
Soft or chewy centers	Rolled too thick in the middle, or taken out too soon	Roll from the center outward. Put soft pieces back in a 300°F (150°C) oven for five minutes
Burned edges, pale middle	Uneven thickness, or the oven's back corner running hot	Pull the finished edge pieces early. Turn the pan halfway through
Hard and tough rather than crisp	Kneaded far too long, or the oil was left out	Two to three minutes of kneading is enough. Keep the full quarter cup of oil
Crisp on day one, soft on day three	The crackers took on moisture from the air	Keep them in an airtight tin. Re-crisp five minutes at 300°F (150°C) and cool before serving

Notes and variations

The oil is why the cracker is tender. Olive oil coats the flour proteins and can limit how much gluten forms. That is part of why a quarter cup of oil gives a cracker that snaps cleanly instead of one you have to tear. Use a bottle you would taste from a spoon, and choose it with the olive oil buying guide. A green, peppery oil comes through clearly in something this lean. The wine adds a faint sharpness, the note that runs through a Puglian tarallo. The same amount of water works, and the cracker is simply plainer. Flour: replace 50 g of the all-purpose flour with fine semolina for a sandier, yellower cracker, or with whole wheat flour for a nuttier one with a little more bite. Toppings go on before the fork, so the holes do not close up around them. Rosemary suits cheese, nigella suits fish and fennel pollen suits cured meat. The finishing salt guide explains why flaky salt belongs on top and fine salt in the dough. Browning happens on dry surfaces, so the thin edges color first and the center catches up. The browning explainer covers the chemistry.

What it is for. A lean cracker has one job, to be the least salty thing on the board so the cheese can be the salty thing. Break the shards long enough to carry a slice of aged pecorino or a spoon of soft goat cheese. Plan quantities with cheese plate math, and look to the cheese course guide for what else goes on the plate. For an aperitivo in the Puglian style, put a bowl of these next to a bowl of olives from the olives guide and a cold glass of the same white wine that went into the dough. The Puglia piece sets that table in its landscape.

Keeping. A cracker stays crisp only while it stays dry. Crisp snacks, saltines among them, lose their snap once they take enough water from the air, so an airtight tin matters more than the date. Kept that way, these hold for about a week. The full storage and shelf life detail is in the guide to crackers and flatbreads at home, and the pantry storage guide covers the tin.

In Denver, the dough needs one correction and the oven needs watching. Water boils at about 203°F at 5,000 feet, but for this dough the dry air matters more than the thin air. Flour kept in a dry climate tends to be drier and absorb more liquid, so the dough will likely need the full 75 ml of water and sometimes a teaspoon more. Moisture also evaporates faster, so the crackers can dry, and color, sooner. Start checking at seven minutes. This dough has no yeast and no baking powder, so none of the leavening corrections in the altitude tables apply. The rest of the thin-air playbook is in the altitude guide.

The oil, the salt and the toppings: De Carlo's Ogliarola Barese monocultivar (shop De Carlo's Ogliarola Barese monocultivar) for the dough, Maldon flakes (shop Maldon flakes) for the top, and Burlap & Barrel's limestone rosemary (shop limestone rosemary) and nigella seed (shop nigella seed), or Casina Rossa fennel pollen (shop Casina Rossa fennel pollen). For a night when the oven stays off, there are finished versions to taste against yours: Rustic Bakery's sel gris flatbread (shop Rustic Bakery's sel gris flatbread) and I Contadini's classic tarallini (shop I Contadini's classic tarallini), a Puglian-style ring made with semolina, flour, white wine and olive oil. The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and ships across the continental U.S. from theambrosianpantry.com.