Sourdough Graham Crackers

If you love sourdough baking and nostalgic treats, these homemade sourdough graham crackers are the perfect recipe to try. They bring together the deep, toasty flavor of classic graham crackers with the unique tang of sourdough, making them a wholesome and delicious snack for both kids and adults. Whether you're pairing them with chocolate and marshmallows for s'mores or enjoying them on their own, these crackers are a satisfying way to use up sourdough discard.

Baking sourdough graham crackers at home is simpler than you might think, and using sourdough starter adds both flavor and texture. This recipe creates crisp, lightly sweetened crackers with hints of honey and cinnamon, and you can easily adjust the thickness and spice to suit your taste.

They're perfect for lunchboxes, road trips, or even crushed up for pie crusts. Once you try them, you'll never want to go back to store bought!

Why You'll Love This Recipe!

So Easy To Make - The dough for these sourdough graham crackers can be thrown together in just seconds using a food processor! Honestly, they're one of my fave things to make for this reason!

Fermented Goodness - The dough for these crackers is fermented for up to 48 hours in the fridge allowing your sourdough starter to work its magic.

Flavor Variations - You can change the dough to suit your own flavor preferences. Don't like honey? Leave it out. Want cinnamon, add it in. Prefer chocolate? I've got instructions for that. In fact I've got a whole heap of flavor variations further down this post.

Ingredients

• Whole Wheat Flour - traditionally graham crackers are made with a coarse version of whole wheat flour called Graham flour. Whole wheat flour is perhaps not quite as coarse, but it's an easy to find alternative that makes these incredibly simple to make.
• All Purpose Flour - I've added all purpose flour to the ingredients because I found it gave a better texture to the crackers. I tested this recipe multiple times with only whole wheat flour and found that the texture was better with a blend. You can of course swap the amount of all purpose flour out and use all whole wheat flour if you prefer.
• Butter - you'll need super cold butter. If you're using a food processor, the butter can just be cut into chunks. If you're mixing the sourdough graham crackers by hand, you'll need to grate the butter (it's easiest to grate frozen butter). I've used frozen butter.
• Sourdough Starter - you can either use active sourdough starter or sourdough starter discard to make this recipe, the choice is yours! I prefer using active sourdough starter if I'm going to ferment the crackers for more than a few hours. Use discard if you're not going to ferment the dough for more than 2 or 3 hours.
• Baking Powder & Baking Soda - just a little of each gives the crackers a lightness and together with the butter creates some delicious flaky layers.
• Salt - you'll need to add a bit of salt to balance the flavors out and ensure that they don't taste too sweet.
• Honey - I've used raw, organic honey but you can use whatever honey you like. You can replace it with maple syrup if you want to. If you want to leave it out, you'll need to add a splash of milk to ensure the mixture isn't too dry.
• Brown Sugar - brown sugar gives the crackers sweetness and adds to the crisp texture.
• Cinnamon - ground cinnamon is an optional add in. I prefer it with cinnamon added, but some people prefer it without. If I'm making these sourdough graham crackers for a charcuterie board I will leave the cinnamon out.

How to Make Sourdough Graham Crackers

These sourdough graham crackers could not be easier to make! Honestly, you can literally throw them together! I prefer to use a food processor to create the dough. I've used a Thermomix, however any food processor or even high powered blender will do the job. You just want to pulse the dough into a wet sand consistency.

Mixing Using A Food Processor

Add all of the ingredients to your food processor and pulse until it looks like wet sand (it takes a few seconds). That's it! It's so easy and my chosen method for making these sourdough graham crackers.

You don't need to grate the butter for this method, just cut the butter into large chunks. It still needs to be super cold though.

Mixing By Hand

Grate the butter, making sure it's super cold. Grating frozen butter is easiest.

Add the whole wheat flour and all purpose flour to a bowl and mix together until well combined. Then add the cold grated butter to the bowl and rub the flour and butter together until it resembles bread crumbs.

Next, add the sourdough starter, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, honey and brown sugar to the bowl and bring everything together into a cohesive dough. You might need to get your hands into the dough to bring it together here.

Forming The Dough

Once you've mixed the dough (no matter whether you've used a food processor or mixed it by hand), tip it out onto the counter and push it together to form a dough. The dough should stick together when you push on it. Divide the dough into two portions, flatten into disks, wrap in parchment paper and place into the fridge to ferment.

You can leave the dough in the fridge for a minimum of 2 hours for up to 48 hours.

When You're Ready To Bake

Preheat your oven to 160C (320F).

Take the dough out of the fridge and roll each piece of dough out to form a rectangle around ¼" thick. Try not to make the dough too thick as it will take too long to bake otherwise (although they are very tasty still).

Cut the dough into rectangles (I made mine 2" x 2.5") and then use the end of a skewer to make the holes in whatever pattern you like (I've done 12 holes). These holes stop the crackers from puffing up so I recommend you add them.

I've measured my rectangles for consistency but you don't have to be this accurate if you don't want to.

Bake the crackers for around 30 minutes at 160C (320F). Check them after 30 minutes and remove from the oven if they are crisp. If they aren't, return them to the oven to bake for a little longer. I like to flip them over if they aren't quite crisp as this can really help the heat to circulate better around the crackers.

Once removed from the oven, allow to cool on the tray for around 5 minutes and once they're cool enough to handle, snap any crackers that haven't come apart during baking and place onto a wire rack to fully cool.

Flavor Variations

There are so many ways you can change the flavor of these sourdough graham crackers to suit your tastes or needs. Here are a few ways to change them up!

Sweet Variations

Chocolate Sourdough Graham Crackers - add 15g of cocoa powder (approx. 1 tablespoon) to the bowl of your food processor when you blitz the dough or to the flour and butter mix when you mix by hand.

Cinnamon Sugar Graham Crackers - Sprinkle the top of the sourdough Graham crackers with cinnamon sugar before baking. Just watch these when you're baking them as the sugar can catch a little.

Peanut Butter Graham Crackers - Swap out the honey for the same weight of peanut butter to give these crackers a hit of peanut butter goodness.

Chai Spiced Graham Crackers - Mix in some chai inspired spices for a cozy, chai-inspired flavor. You could add some pre mixed spices or use ¼ teaspoon cardamom, 1 teaspoon ginger, ¼ teaspoon cloves and ¼ teaspoon nutmeg.

Pumpkin Spice Graham Crackers - Replace the honey with the same weight of pumpkin purée and add 1 - 2 tablespoons of pumpkin pie spice.

Savory Variations (for cheese boards or dips)

Rosemary & Sea Salt – add chopped fresh rosemary and a light sprinkle of flaky salt for a savory twist.

Cheddar & Cracked Pepper – Mix in finely grated sharp cheddar and a touch of black pepper for a grown-up version.

Our Version of Indoor S'mores

My boys are absolutely in love with s'mores (ever since I let them watch The Sandlot Kids). I didn't grow up with Graham crackers, or S'mores (they aren't a thing here in Australia). But my boys absolutely love them (I brought home real graham crackers from a trip to New York and they thought it was Christmas). Now we make homemade sourdough Graham crackers, they can have "sourdough s'mores" anytime which is so cool!

Whenever we have a bonfire in the paddock, we make "proper S'mores". But sometimes, just for fun, we make "indoor s'mores". We either toast the marshmallows on the gas burner on our range or we lay the Hershey's on the sourdough graham crackers, then top them with marshmallows and pop them in the microwave for 10 to 15 seconds. This is just enough for the marshmallows to melt. Then you pop the top graham cracker or "lid" on and squish them. Voila! They're so good! And a fun treat no matter what the weather is like outside.

How To Store + Freeze

These sourdough graham crackers will stay crisp for up to a week if stored correctly in an airtight container. I prefer to store mine in a cookie tin or glass jar. I find they go soft if stored in plastic.

You can freeze the unbaked dough. One way to do this is to roll the dough out and cut it into rectangles, even adding the perforations. Snap freeze the dough on cooke sheets. Once frozen, transfer the sheets of parchment paper into zip loc bags and then put them back into the freezer.

You can then bake a sheet of them from frozen whenever you need some freshly baked sourdough graham crackers. How cool is that?

Share the sourdough love!