Sam Whitaker

Cheese doesn’t just add flavor to a cracker dough — that’s the myth that trips up nearly every home baker’s first attempt, mine included. When I first tried building sourdough cheese crackers to mimic the boxed ones I grew up snacking on, I blew past the target entirely: what came out of my oven was … Read more

325°F. That’s the temperature I bake almost every seeded batch at, a full 25 degrees below what works fine for a plain sourdough cracker — and that one number is the difference between seeds that toast beautifully and seeds that turn bitter and black before the dough even finishes crisping. Seeded crackers have always vanished … Read more

Why do your sourdough crackers bend instead of snapping cleanly in half? Nine times out of ten, it traces back to one of a handful of fixable habits — and I’ve made every single one of these mistakes myself. Across 11 years of sourdough baking, including a stretch running a small home microbakery where I … Read more

Early on — maybe four or five years into keeping a starter going — I used to scrape half a jar of discard straight into the trash most Sunday mornings, convinced there was nothing worth doing with it. That habit ended the day crackers entered my rotation, and now that same jar of discard is … Read more