Gothenburg-Style Sourdough Crackers

Bake sourdough for long enough and you start wanting to make other things with it. I have written a recipe for sourdough crackers here before.

Sourdough Crackers with a Gentle Tang

Those crackers tasted good — a gentle acidity to them — but the texture was hard and gritty, not quite what I had in mind.

The other day I got hold of some sourdough crackers made by Göteborgs, a Swedish brand sold at KALDI, so let's study them for the next attempt.

First, the ingredients listed on the packet.

Ingredients (Göteborgs crackers):

• Flour
• Vegetable oils (sunflower oil, olive oil)
• Rye flour
• Wheat starch
• Sourdough
• Sugar
• Salt
• Malt extract
• Yeast

Ingredient lists are written in descending order of quantity, if I remember rightly. If so, there is a good deal of oil in these. Let me compare with the crackers I made last time.

Ingredients (my previous sourdough crackers):

• Starter (bread flour) 20g
• Starter (rye and whole wheat) 20g
• Plain flour 60g
• Olive oil 2 tbsp
• Water 1 tbsp
• Sugar 7g
• Salt 3g

Looking at it this way: the starter should be bread flour alone, about 30g. And against 60g of plain flour, roughly 10g of rye seems right.

Ingredients (notes for next time):

• Plain flour 60g
• Olive oil 35cc
• Starter (bread flour) 30g
• Rye flour 10g
• Water 10cc
• Sugar 7g
• Salt 3g

That is roughly what I want to try next time.

The texture is very thin, and crisp — snapping rather than crunching. Something close to pastry, if that conveys it. There is clearly a lot of fat in them, and they may well stretch and fold the dough a few times during shaping. Above all, you have to roll it out and out at the end, until it is genuinely thin.

Also, last time I baked at 200°C for about 15 minutes; 170–180°C is probably better. That should avoid the hard, over-baked grittiness and give something crisp and snapping instead.

So — will the next batch come out like this? Either way, these Göteborgs sourdough crackers are extremely good, so do buy a packet if you come across them.