Olive Oil Crackers with Olives
No butter, no yeast, five ingredients: the recipe that shows most plainly what olive oil does in a dough.
- Time
- 40 minutes
- Serves
- About 40 crackers
- Level
- Easy
- Cuisine
- Mediterranean
This recipe is the plainest demonstration of what olive oil does in a dough: no butter, no yeast, no egg. What remains is flour, water, salt and oil.
The oil's job is to cut the gluten network. Rubbed into the flour, it coats the particles and stops them meeting water and forming long gluten chains. The result is a texture that snaps rather than stretches — which is precisely what a cracker is.
That is also what separates it from a butter cracker: butter is solid at room temperature and melts as it bakes, while olive oil is liquid from the start and distributes evenly through the dough. This is why an olive oil cracker stays crisp rather than hard once cool. We described the same logic in the savoury olive cake.
Directions
- Heat the oven to 190°C and line two baking trays.
- Mix the flour, salt and oregano in a wide bowl.
- Add the olive oil and rub it into the flour with your fingertips until the mixture looks like damp sand.
- Stir in the chopped olives.
- Add the warm water a little at a time until you have a dough that comes together and does not stick. Do not overwork it.
- Divide the dough in two and roll each piece out between two sheets of paper to a thickness of two millimetres.
- Cut into squares or rectangles with a knife or cutter, and prick each one several times with a fork.
- Brush with water and scatter over the seeds and coarse salt.
- Bake for fifteen to eighteen minutes, until the edges are golden.
- Cool completely on a rack — soft while hot, crisp once cold.
Tips & storage
Do not knead. We do not want gluten developing in this dough. Stop the moment it comes together; kneaded dough gives a hard biscuit, not a cracker.
Roll to 2 mm. Rolled thicker, the dough puffs in the oven and loses its snap. Rolling between two sheets of paper is the easiest way to get it thin without adding flour.
Pricking with a fork is essential. Undocked crackers balloon in the oven and bake unevenly.
Chop the olives VERY finely. A large piece splits the dough and the cracker breaks there. They should be almost a paste.
The edges colour before the middle. Lift the crackers at the edge of the tray a few minutes early.
Soft while hot is normal. The crispness develops as they cool; don't judge them warm.
Storage. A week in an airtight container. If they soften, five minutes at 150°C brings the snap back.
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