[This is an old recipe. My newer and much better recipe is here.]
You might have seen raw sprouted crackers in the Very Expensive Raw Food section of your local natural food store. They're about $25 a pound, even though they're made mostly of flax seeds that cost about $1 a pound. I'm not even a raw foodist, but sometimes I buy them anyway because they taste really, really good! After a lot of experimenting, I figured out how to make something similar at home.
The first problem is that flax seeds are tricky to sprout. When you get them wet, they form a slimy mass that doesn't let air in, so instead of sprouting they rot. There are special tools you can buy to get around this, but I wanted a technique that works with stuff in an ordinary kitchen. So I experimented with other seeds. Wheat is very easy to sprout, but it's no longer cheaper than flax, and by itself it makes crackers that are as hard as rocks. Buckwheat sprouts well and is super-easy to grind, but it also gets gooey when wet. Quinoa is super-nutritious and easy to sprout, but more expensive.
Over several years (because one batch lasts a long time) I tried various recipes with those four seeds, mixing the flax seeds with other stuff to space them out and let air in. One time I was stuck in the suburbs without buckwheat, and the batch without it tasted better, so I dropped it. And I eventually came up with a good recipe:
Ingredients
3 Cups Red wheat berries
4 Cups Flax seeds
2 Cups Quinoa
2 Cups Powdered vegetables and spices
Unrefined salt
Olive oil
Unchlorinated water for soaking
Tools
One wide-mouth glass jar, at least a half gallon
2-5 cookie sheets or baking pans
A hand grinder or a powerful food processor
A giant bowl or pot, or several small ones
A knife and a spatula
An oven
Procedure
Soak the wheat berries in the the big jar for 8-12 hours. Drain the water. I used to drain it through my fingers but sometimes that gets extra bacteria in the wheat, so now I drain it by holding the jar lid on loosely. You can also use a wire mesh strainer. At this point, you can either let them start sprouting for another 8 hours and rinse and drain again, or go straight to the next step -- more experimentation is needed.
Lay out your pans. You need enough surface area to hold all your sprouting seeds no more than 3/4 inch (2cm) deep. Don't oil them. Now dump the wheat berries into the pans.
Put the flax seeds in the jar, and fill it with at least double the volume of water. Soak the flax seeds 3-4 minutes, shaking now and then, and drain. Flax seeds in water produce slime, which may be too thick to drain easily. If so, you'll have to add more water to thin it and drain again. This is one of the hard parts. You might need a good wire mesh strainer, or you could drain them through cheesecloth or a rag, but it's
very difficult to get flax seeds out of cloth. If you run it through the washer, you won't get them all off and some of them will stick to other things in the washer. Something I haven't tried is to set the rag out for the birds to pick clean.
Anyway, when you get the flax seeds mostly drained, add them to the pans, mix them up with the wheat, and spread it all out. You need to keep the seeds moist but also maximize air penetration. This is another hard part. I always poke holes in the spread seeds to help air get in. I don't cover them with a rag because of the sticky flax problem, but stack the pans with just enough offset to let some air in, and an empty pan on top.
If the seeds seem too wet, leave the pans uncovered and remix them a few times a day. If they seem too dry, or parts of them seem too dry, you can sprinkle water in. After you do this a few times you'll develop a sense of how wet they should be. Also, here's a good general page on
sprouting.
Now, use the jar a third time to soak the quinoa. Quinoa can soak for as little as an hour or as long as 8 hours. I like to time it so that the quinoa will be done soaking about a day after I spread out the flax/wheat. Quinoa sprouts fast! When it's done, you can either mix it in with the other seeds or spread it on top, or maybe sprout it separately in the jar, which I haven't tried.
Instead of watching the clock, watch the seeds! When the mix is ready, the wheat should be obviously sprouting, but the sprouts should not be green yet. If the flax is visibly sprouting, you're doing very well. If you see tiny spots of mold on the flax, pick them off and immediately put it all in the grinder. The wheat sprouts are likely to get "fuzzy" looking from the micro-roots, but this is not mold. If you're not sure, taste it and spit it out.
I use a Corona mill, an excellent grinder for stuff coarser than flour. For me the hardest part of the whole job is pushing the sticky mass of seeds bit by bit down into the grinder. I have one hand turning the crank and the other hand repeatedly jamming and holding the stuff down with a spoon. It's messy! A powerful food processor works better, but even then you'll need to do it in several batches. It doesn't need to be ground to a featureless paste, but the wheat needs to be well-crushed or it'll crack your teeth. Plan to spend more than an hour on the grinding, maybe two, and that doesn't count cleaning.
Now, put the stuff in a giant bowl and add the flavorings. See what your local natural food store has in the bulk section. Onion powder is good and cheap, carrot powder is also good but harder to find, and tomato powder is excellent but even harder to find and more expensive. You might have to try different ones based on what you can get. I always put some curry powder in but not too much because it can be bitter. Once I tried some green powder, with wheatgrass and spirulina, and the crackers tasted pretty bad. I've had great results with dulse flakes. For salt I use Redmond "real salt," but Celtic and Lima sea salt are also excellent.
It took me a while to get a good recipe because I was too cautious on the quantites of powdered vegetables. You need a lot! If you can't get them, you'll have to improvise with other flavorings. Clarified butter is good, but do not use regular butter! It goes bad too fast. Of course strict raw foodists will not use either. Coconut oil might work but I haven't tried it. Honey is nice, and you could also try almonds -- I would probably soak and sprout them with the wheat. Sesame seeds will improve the flavor but make the crackers fall apart.
Anyway, when you've added everything, knead it all together with your hands for several minutes. Spread a generous layer of olive oil in your biggest pans, and start pressing the mixture in. If you don't have enough pans, you'll have to dry them in multiple batches. I use two 12x17 inch aluminum cookie sheets, which together hold about half the mix, so I put the other half in a bowl in the fridge for a day or two while the first half gets mostly dry. I press the stuff into the pans with my hands, and finally work it over with a rolling pin or a cylindrical jar. Try to get it totally flat with a uniform thickness of about a quarter inch. Finally, take a knife and cut the stuff in each pan into squares of whatever size you want your crackers.
The only thing left is to dry them. A real dehydrator is perfect, but an oven works too. To keep all the advantages of rawness (which I won't go into here), the temperature should not go above 115 degrees. Most ovens don't go that low, but the pilot light in a gas oven, or the light bulb in an electric oven, works tolerably well. I let them go overnight, then get a spatula and flip them all over to dry the other side. I also turn the oven on for just a couple minutes a few times a day, but I've learned to always set a timer, because if you forget to turn it off, your crackers are cooked! A few more flips and a couple more days and they're done.
To keep someone from turning the oven on and accidentally burning your crackers, a great trick is to remove the dial and put it inside with your stuff.
Sprouted crackers are excellent for camping, long trips, emergency food, or portable snacks to avoid junk food when you're away from home. A little bit goes a long way.
(public domain, anti-copyright, updated June 2008)