Homemade Cheez-It Crackers

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Not every homemade recipe is something you’ll make all the time. Most cooks have a stash of the day-to-day basic recipes that get used all the time, but then also have a stash of recipes for special occasions and those times when something a little out of the ordinary sounds fun. And you probably guessed it – homemde Cheez-it crackers fall into the second category.

Will you make your own Cheez-its from scratch every week? Most likely not. But once in a while it’s fun to have something a little different around for eating or to give your little kitchen helpers something interesting to create.

The dough for these homemade cheese crackers goes together fast in the food processor. In fact making the dough is the easy part that can be done a day or two ahead of time if you want. The dough needs to be chilled before you roll it, and it’s OK sitting in the refrigerator wrapped in wax paper overnight or even longer if needed.

The more time consuming part of this recipe is rolling the dough and cutting it into squares.  But even that part of the process goes fairly quickly with the help of a pastry wheel (A pastry wheel like this one with a fluted edge works nicely).  If you don’t have a pastry wheel, a pizza cutter would work too.

I like to make a little hole in each cracker too which helps them look like their store-bought counterparts and also helps offset some of the puffiness of the cracker. Here again, you can be resourceful and use what you have. Something like a bamboo skewer would work, and I ended up using this wine bottle stopper-thing I had around which worked well too!

The most important thing is to roll the dough VERY thinly. If the dough is not rolled thinly, you’ll end up with tall puffy crackers. And yes, I found that out the hard way.

The combo of shredded cheese, turmeric, and ground red pepper give nice natural coloring to these crackers too, as well as giving them a tasty boost of flavor. You might find that these homemade crackers are a little softer than store bought crackers, but that was OK with me because they were still very tasty little crackers!