We made goldfish yesterday!
Okay... not really goldfish, but we used a recipe for homemade goldfish crackers and it was amazing. And if you're familiar with baking, it's basically a flaky pie crust with cheese!
Are you ready to start? I did some adjusting to the original recipe that can be found here.
First off, you need a food processor or blender. You could also do this with a dough blender like this one on Amazon. You just need something that's going to chop the butter into the flour.
For ingredients, you need:
1 cup flour of choice. I used this King Arthur Flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoon COLD unsalted butter (we use organic)
1-1.5 cups of your cheese of choice, shredded
3 or more tablespoons of water
Here's how we made our crackers:
Mix the flour and salt thoroughly - I put ours in the food processor and whirled it a bit.
Cut up the cold butter into chunks and place the cubes in the flour mixture. If you don't have any of the tools I mentioned, you could use a fork, it's just going to take a while. (You want COLD butter, just like pie crust recipes, so the crackers get flaky layers when they bake!)
Pulse the flour/butter mixture until it looks like coarse meal. You may need to get in there and loosen the flour at the bottom. I ended up dumping it out of the food processor and then back in because ours packed to the bottom. Whoops.
Add 1-1.5 cups of COLD shredded cheese while running the processor/blender/fork. You'll add as much cheese here as you want - we went a bit above a cup as the original batch didn't seem cheesy enough.
Once you're happy with the cheesiness, add 1 Tbsp of water at a time while mixing. You want it wet enough to shape, but not too wet so it doesn't flop in the oven.
Ball up the dough and roll it out between two pieces of parchment paper. I didn't hesitate to get my hands in there to make the edges nice and get it about 1/8 inch thick. Thinner = crispier and faster to cook, but we liked ours rolled out about the thickness of a regular goldfish cracker.
Cool the dough in the fridge for 10-20 minutes. you want the dough COLD when you work with it and bake it.
Cut the shapes. Putting any dough you need to rework in the fridge. Remember COLD dough. I was lame and did 1/2 inch squares because I had a pizza roller and squares are easy, but I'm seriously considering this 5 Goldfish Cutter or this 72 Goldfish Cutter. Which one do you think??
Bake at 350* for 12-20 minutes. This will all depend on the thickness. Ours were happily baked at 15 minutes.
Enjoy! We ate about half the batch right as soon as they cooled, but if you need to store them, get them in an airtight container and apparently they'll keep for 1 week.
We put ours in a Stasher bag on the counter and the kids have been sneaking some from time to time. Let's face it. So did I! They're sooooo good! I'm honestly convinced I'll never buy goldfish or cheesy crackers from the store again. These were so easy and the girls helped by dumping things into the food processor and it was really easy, to be honest.
I think I'm even more stoked about the idea of making different flavors in the future. Maybe try to make Parmesan, or colby jack, or even pizza ones... tomato basil type flavor, right??
Either way, if you make these, let us know what ingredients you used, any substitutions if you made any, and how you liked them! I really hope you enjoy them! Because nothing beats a snack cracker with 5 ingredients that you have at home!
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