Cheese Straws
Cheese straws are my southern grandmother’s most famous recipe. They are the perfect snack and are great with cocktails.
This recipe requires a “corkscrew-style” cookie press, one that allows you to extrude long wavy crackers. If you would like to make these and do not have a device that can create the shape in the picture, contact me and I can see what I can do.
Time: 1 hr
Difficulty: 3/5
Tested: YES
Makes: 40-50 crackers
Ingredients
2 8-ounce (200 gram) packages of Black Diamond Extra Old cheddar cheese
½ cup (1 stick or square) of butter
¾ teaspoon table salt
2 cups all-purpose flour
Method
Let unopened cheese soften on the counter overnight.
Let butter soften about an hour or so before you intend to make the cheese straws.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Grate cheese and place in the mixing bowl of a Kitchen Aid mixer. Add butter and salt.
Whip cheese, butter and salt using whip attachment of mixer. Whip at high speed until ingredients become somewhat fluffy – perhaps 4-5 minutes.
Reduce mixer speed, and slowly add about 1 ½ cups of flour. Do not over-mix. Stop mixer and remove bowl. Work additional flour into dough by hand until mixture is just dry enough to fall off the hand. A typical batch of cheese will require a total of 1 ¾ to 2 cups of flour to reach this stage. Work dough so that flour is spread uniformly throughout.
Put dough into cookie press and roll out dough in strips on ungreased cookie sheets. Cut into 3-5” lengths.
Bake at 350 degrees until edges of cheese straws begin to darken. In our oven, we bake cheese straws for a total of about 16-18 minutes, turning the trays front to back and top to bottom halfway through the cooking process. We use double thickness baking sheets, and so the cooking time may be less on single thickness baking sheets.
Remove from oven, and let cool on baking sheets for 5 minutes.
NOTE: The trick to making good cheese straws is to incorporate just the right amount of flour given the oil content in the particular batch of cheese. If you add too much flour, then the cheese straws will be cake-like rather than crisp; and they will not taste “cheesy.” If you add too little, then the cheese straws will not retain their shape and will not be crispy. The only way to tell for sure if you have the right amount of flour is to have someone show you what the dough “feels like” when you have the right amount of flour. Once you have the correct “feel,” then you will never again have to guess about how much flour to incorporate.