Crisp Bread (Dairy-Free)

July 8, 2013 By elviira 34 Comments

There are those rainy summer days when I don’t want to leave the house but get warm and cozy inside. Maybe I heat the oven and bake some of my all-time favorite munchies for comfort. This superb crisp bread is one of my all-time favorite munchies. Crunchy, tasty and crispy, without gluten and as healthful as possible, it might become one of your all-time favorite munchies as well.

Munch this crunchy crisp bread just like that, or with butter and cheese. For real comfort, top it with sugar-free strawberry or raspberry jam. My favorite way to eat this bread, in addition to load a slice with butter and cheese, is to crumble it over my breakfast yogurt — it’s just like granola, but not sweet, though.

Tips for making this crisp bread

This is very simple and easy bread to make after taking care of a couple of things: the ideal coarseness of the seed mixture and the ideal thickness of the batter on the baking sheet.

The finer the texture of the ground seed mixture, the better the bread holds together. Really finely ground seed mixture doesn’t produce crunchy bread, though. The bread will be rather leathery if the texture is too smooth. On the other hand, too coarse seed mixture will produce bread which is crunchy, but which is also crumbly.

The thickness of the bread affects also how well the bread holds together. The thicker the bread, the better it holds together and the bigger pieces you can break from the bread. Very thin bread is crumbly. On the other hand, too thick bread is not nice to eat, so you might want to make bread which is something in between. For me 0.2 inches (0.5 cm) has been the ideal thickness.

I use a substantial amount of salt because I prefer my bread rather salty. If you don’t like salty bread, please feel free to reduce the amount of salt.

This recipe makes two baking sheets of bread. If you don’t want that much, or if you just want to try out if this bread is your cup of tea, you can halve the amounts of ingredients.

So, let’s get started. Seeds and salt placed in a food processor.

Then processed until the mixture resembles coarse meal.

The blade removed; eggs and oil added.

Then just some mixing with a spoon so that everything is well mixed.

Batter divided in two parts, each part placed on baking sheet lined with parchment paper.

Then spreading the batter with spoon…

…until it’s flat and even, approximately 0.2 inches (0.5 cm) thick.

My crisp bread experiments

Actually, this crisp bread has almost nothing to do with that crisp bread we eat here in Finland and in other Nordic countries. The traditional crisp bread is made from rye flour, salt and water. My version doesn’t have any of those — except salt. But since my version is crispy and it’s bread, I call it crisp bread.

I started developing this bread when my toddler was begging for some crisp bread — obviously because my dad was eating that traditional Finnish crisp bread. Since me and my toddler eat completely gluten-free food, the traditional crisp bread was out of question. And because they don’t sell any healthy gluten-free crisp bread here, I had to develop my own, simple and healthy version.

In this final recipe I have heavily simplified a version which I found from a Finnish low-carb forum. There is almost nothing left from the original version. I’ve tried different ratios of seeds, oil and eggs and this one is the best in my opinion. And the simplest. My family likes it as well, also my dad who loves to eat traditional crisp bread — he immediately fell in love with this one. Lucky me.

But when I first started thinking of crisp bread, I had to choose which nuts or seeds to use. I thought my favorite seeds. Something low-carb and not very strong tasting. Sunflower seeds would be the best option. Somehow I was also thinking of flax seeds — a great addition to otherwise plain sunflower seeds.

Then just salt for better flavor and a couple of tablespoons oil for richer flavor and texture. From three different fats I use, butter, coconut oil and olive oil, the latter was a natural choice for this crisp bread.

In my first experiments I used too few eggs. The bread was hard and it was blistering in the oven. Actually, what was even worse was that the batter was really hard to spread on the baking sheet. The batter was too runny to roll out and too stiff to spread with spoon. That was also a problem I wanted to solve.

Next I added more oil, hoping that the batter is easier to spread. It wasn’t, but the bread tasted delicious! I doubled the amount of eggs to see if that affects the spreadability. It did. The consistency of the batter was just right to get it nicely and evenly on the baking sheet. Even better, the bread didn’t blister in the oven and the texture was crunchy. The bread was almost melting in my mouth.