Crackers are a rare, flexible food that works at any time of day: topped with sauce or gelatin for breakfast, used as bread for an afternoon sandwich, or as an appetizer for dinner.
There are also many tactics to do them. I’m going to check out 4 popular recipes from celebrity chefs Bobby Flay, Carla Hall, Alton Brown, and Guy Fieri to see which ones are the best.
Read on to see how the recipes compare.
Flay’s old buttermilk biscuit recipe called for typical ingredients, adding extra-chilled butter, flour, and buttermilk.
What caught my attention is that these cookies are spread with heavy cream and sprinkled with freshly ground black pepper before baking. Then, when they come out of the oven, they are covered with melted butter.
I blended the dry ingredients in a giant bowl and then “cut” the small pieces of extra-cold butter with my hands.
Once I added the buttermilk, things temporarily got a little complicated. The dough was sticky and difficult to remove from my fingers.
From there, I placed the dough on a floured cutting board and patted it into a rectangular shape before using a round cutter to make each biscuit.
I’m afraid those cookies wouldn’t have the right texture since the recipe didn’t require any folding.
I placed each biscuit round on a tray lined with a silicone baking mat, then I brushed them with cream and sprinkled on black pepper.
The cookies didn’t require any resting time, so I put them in the oven and baked them for 12 minutes.
They came out golden with good height, and I finished them off with a generous brushing of melted butter.
I was incredibly inspired by her look. They had the best golden color and the background was also golden but not burnt.
I opened one and it had a light and fluffy internal texture with a crispy exterior.
I liked the little kick from the black pepper on top, and the flavor was slightly buttery. I think the dough itself could’ve used a bit more salt or butter for more flavor. But overall, these were pretty good.
For the most part, Hall’s recipe called for the same ingredients as the others, with the only major difference being sugar.
Hall’s recipe says you can use a food processor or your hands. I chose to check my hands to worry about over-mixing the dough.
The recipe is pretty straightforward. I just combined all the dry ingredients.
I put the yetter in the freezer for about 30 minutes before following Hall’s recipe, but it didn’t seem like enough time. When grating, the yetter temporarily melted in my hand and on the grater.
The yetra actually needed to be frozen, and mine was usually frozen, but not completely frozen. This meant there was a lot of weed stuck to the grater or melted on my fingers, and I think I lost enough to have an effect on the final result.
From there, I added in the buttermilk and the dough became very sticky. But I was able to fold it, letter-style, a few times while adding flour and using a bench scraper to lift the dough off my work surface.
I cut out the cookies and placed them bottom up on a baking sheet covered with a silicone baking mat. I then placed the pan in the refrigerator for 15 minutes before baking.
Hall cookies came out of the oven with a pale, overbaked base of a dark gold color.
They have very little money, the least of all income.
When I broke open a cookie, it made a flaky sound, revealing a very crunchy exterior and a chewy interior.
The bottom had an overdone, slightly burnt taste, but the middle and top were delicious.
I think the biggest issue here was that I lost so much butter while grating it.
Another imaginable challenge is that when pounding the cookies face up on the baking sheet, as the recipe says, the stickiest aspect of the dough was on the back, which seemed to cook too temporarily and burn.
Because Brown is so focused on the science of baking, I was nervous from the beginning that making his cookies would be a challenge.
But the scarcity of ingredients, many of which are kitchen staples, eased my fears.
Brown’s cookie dough turned out to be ready to make, albeit a little dirty.
I started by mixing the dry ingredients in a bowl and then used my hands to cut in the butter and shortening. I worked as temporarily as possible to keep those refrigerated ingredients from melting.
After adding the buttermilk, the dough is incredibly sticky and difficult to paint. But the procedure of folding the dough about six times helped make it more flexible.
I was slightly concerned that all of this folding would ruin the texture from overhandling and warming up the butter.
Other than the mess, these were quick to assemble. They didn’t require any proofing or chilling time, and I didn’t have to brush the tops with anything prior to baking.
The biscuits baked up into beautifully golden rounds, although they didn’t rise as much as I’d expected.
I opened one to find a comfortable interior that isn’t dense despite the slight increase. The outside is also a little flaky.
The flavor definitely tasted like a biscuit, but I thought it could use more butter.
For the most part, Fieri’s buttermilk biscuits had similar ingredients to the others, with the exception of swapping some of the all-purpose flour for cake flour and standard salt for sea salt.
Hall presented a manual selection to the food processor, but Fieri’s recipe only said how to make the cookies with this kitchen tool.
The food processor was less complicated than blending by hand, but it loaded a few extra dishes to wash at the end.
The dough is also sticky and difficult to remove from the processor bowl and blades.
After making the dough, I had to fold it once and pat it out into a large rectangle before cutting it into nine rectangular biscuits.
This was the only recipe that called for oblong cookies instead of circular ones.
I gathered the pieces and placed them on a tray, then covered them and let them rest at room temperature for 15 minutes.
After the biscuits rested and the oven heated to 500 degrees Fahrenheit, I brushed the biscuits with butter and sprinkled them with a generous amount of sea salt.
As I popped them in the oven, I turned the heat down to 450 degrees Fahrenheit and let them bake for 14 minutes.
The cookies looked like they got here brand new out of the oven. They were browned – not as golden as the others – and browned on the bottom.
They looked more like buns, so I was skeptical that they tasted like cookies.
Upon breaking one in, I immediately noticed that it was much softer than the others I had tried, but it didn’t fall apart all over the place.
Love at first sight.
The biscuits were so fluffy and buttery inside, and the sea salt and butter on top gave them so much flavor.
Turns out cake flour was a game changer because the oblong cookies looked pillowy inside and out.
I would try to make one of those cookies again, but after just one bite of the Fieri cookies, I knew they would be my favorite.
The next morning, Fieri’s biscuits were the first ones I grabbed to make a breakfast sandwich, and I’m pleased to report that, although they were bland, they still had an egg and a patty. of “soy” without collapsing.
Click to see the other celebrity chef recipes compared so far.
“Bobthrough at Home: Fearless Flavors from My Kitchen” via Bobthrough Flay, Sally Jackson, Stephanie Banyas – View on Amazon and Walmart
“Guy Fieri’s Food: Cook It, Live It, Love It” via Guy Fieri – View on Amazon
“EveryDayCook” via Alton Brown – View on Amazon
“Carla Hall’s Soul Food” by Carla Hall – See at Amazon
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