Don’t cracker up after this pun!
- Crackers are dough-based food products and are typically thin or wafer like biscuits that generally range in size up to 8 centimetres (3 inches).
- The main ingredient of crackers is generally a grain, like wheat or rice ground into flour, and water, and they are often flavoured with seeds, herbs, spices, salt, stocks or other flavours.
- Crackers are typically shaped circular or square, although they can also be found in a range of other shapes, such as rectangles, stars and triangles.
- Crackers are generally plain or savoury flavoured and are commonly eaten as snacks, with dips, spreads, sliced meat, cheese, and sliced vegetables.
- Most commonly, crackers feature holes named ‘docking holes’, that serve the purpose of preventing air bubbles in the pastry and allowing moisture to escape during the cooking process.
- The wheat-produced pita, lavish and matzo flatbreads, among others, were the predecessors of the cracker.
- Crackers can be home-made, or available for purchase in packages from supermarkets, and sales of the biscuit in the United States alone reaches more than ten billion dollars annually.
- It is believed that crackers were invented in 1792 by John Pearson, in Massachusetts’s Newburyport, in the United States, as a sailor biscuit replacement.
- Crackers are typically made commercially in large sheets, with docker pins pressing holes into the food, before they are baked in an oven.
- The word ‘cracker’ is said to have originated from the crackling sound created by the accidental burning of the biscuit.
Bibliography
Cracker (Food), 2015, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cracker_(food)
Hiskey D, Why Crackers Have Holes, 2012, Today I Found Out, http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2010/10/why-crackers-have-holes/
