Recipe: Sourdough Crackers

Homemade sourdough crackers are delicious, super easy, and one of our all-time favorite ways to help use up extra sourdough starter. If you have your own starter, you know that it needs to be routinely fed and used. And when you don’t quite have the time (or appetite) for a full loaf that’s where these crackers come in.

These crackers are super easy because you are not using your sourdough starter to replace yeast (these crackers don't need to rise at all!), instead you are using the starter to add a bit complexity to the flavor profile of these homemade crackers.

Instead of discarding your extra sourdough starter (which always feels super wasteful to us), you can quickly turn them into delicious sourdough crackers and top with whatever herbs, spices or seeds you have on hand. These crackers come together quickly, don't involve weighing your flour to the gram and are crunchy, delicious and entirely customizable.

What is a Sourdough Starter?

To make sourdough bread you rely on wild yeast for rising instead of the usual baking yeast that you find in the super market. Those quick-rise packets of yeast are designed to produce a lot of CO2 quickly for dough to rise. Wild yeast on the other hand has a mind of its own, takes it’s time to rise, but rewards you for your patience with complex flavors, chewy textures, gaps of air and sturdy crusts.

A sourdough starter is a wet dough that is chock full of wild yeast that you use instead of those packets of baking yeast. If you have a friend (or a generous local bakery) they can give you a bit of their starter to get started. But if not, growing your own sourdough starter from scratch is super easy, all you need if flour, water and a bit of time. Check out our full guide for How to to Grow a Sourdough Starter from Scratch.

Why do you need to feed and discard your Sourdough Starter?

Unlike those packets of commercial yeast that are completely dormant, the wild yeast in your sourdough starter is awake, and hungry. Which means you need to regularly feed it to keep it healthy and ready to bake with. But if you are feeding your starter more often than you’re baking with it, you’re going to end up with an awful lot of sourdough starter on your hands (and it will want more and more flour to stay happy). To avoid an ever-growing starter it is often recommended that you discard a portion of your sourdough starter every time you feed it. And if that sounds wasteful we totally agree. That’s why we prefer to think of this as extra sourdough starter, and use it in recipes (like these super easy sourdough crackers) in between baking loaves of sourdough bread.