Cajun Crackers

It’s a cool rainy fall day here in Ohio. I decided to make up a batch of Cajun crackers this morning; one of my favorite snacks & to eat with appetizers. I got the recipe from my Texan sister. It is made from saltine crackers, olive oil, crushed red pepper & Hidden Valley’s original ranch dressing mix. I tamed it down some, 1 heaping TBS of crushed red pepper is enough for me and ½ package of the dressing mix makes it less salty. I also found ¾ cup of olive oil is plenty. I have tried it with other buttery crackers but the saltines are best for my taste. For this batch I used Nabisco’s Premium fat free with sea salt.

Update: after crackers sat overnight not soaking up the olive oil well, do not use fat free crackers.

I know this is not pellet smoked but they go well with smoked appetizers. I just might try to smoke some, may be good! A lot of pelletheads have smoked the rice cereal snack mix so why not crackers. I will come back & update with a photo of them after they soak up all that good stuff.

Printable cracker recipe

Ingredients

Olive oil mix

Drizzled on crackers

After first mix

Update
It has been raining all day so I decided to try smoking some Cajun crackers and bought some all natural almonds to smoke too. For the almonds I sprayed with olive oil & added McCormicks CA. style coarse grind garlic with parsley and some sea salt. I nuked the almonds for 2 min in the microwave stirring after 1 min. I placed the crackers & almonds in my Pampered Chef wire basket, got them on smoking at an average 180 deg. Tasted a cracker after 45 min. & they were done. I could taste some smoke but they were a little dry so I would say wait & do them after sitting over night until they soak up the olive oil. Mine had only sat about 6 hours. I went to 225 for 15 more minutes on the almonds. They were good but should have put more olive oil on them, I thought I had almost too much. I could also taste some smoke in the almonds. Next spring I may break down & buy a Smoke Daddy so I can get some more smoke in things like this and do some cold smoking too. For a snack I had some of the smoked Cajun crackers, 3 with some mustard & my smoked ring bologna and 3 with mustard & my Ohio Country Pâté, pan pudding. What a treat!!

Crackers & Almonds smoking

Almonds cooling

My appetizers

Smokin Don