Accidental Barley Graham Crackers: Lessons in Baking Without a Recipe

Shortbread is definitely my favorite cookie. It isn’t sickeningly sweet, like most cookies, and they are dead simple to make. So dead simple, in fact, that the other day I decided I could take a quick glance at a recipe and then go from there.

I had barley flour, so I decided I’d use that in place of all-purpose flour. I do that a lot – substituting different flours for all-purpose – and most of the time it works well. There’s a bit of finagling one has to do with the amount of liquid, letting the dough sit to hydrate, etc. But with that in the back of my mind I can usually make it work. (Also, I don’t particularly like to follow recipes. Which is why I don’t usually bake with them, or at least not with any personal need to stick with them. There, my secret’s out.)

Then I decided I’d use sorghum molasses instead of sugar. There are all sorts of things that this throws off – sweetness, moisture, and acidity for starters. But hey, things were already getting wildly out of hand so why not?

I stuck with butter for the fat, ya know, since I didn’t want to muck anything up.

So yeah, at this point I was not making shortbread cookies, even though I thought I was. I patted the dough out onto the greased cookie sheet thinking it felt a bit too moist for shortbread. I cut it into eighths thinking it would fall into a billion pieces after it was baked. I docked it all over with a fork wondering if it would even remotely resemble a cookie.

It turned out to be the best graham crackers we’ve ever had.