In various posts, I’ve referenced the long-time favorite restaurant from a bygone era, the Raleigh-based and southeast-spread Darryl’s. (The cappuccino cake and Cajun shrimp have been among my desperate attempts to live in that former glory.) The Broken Chains blog has a very nice piece about Darryl's, as does The Onyx Plate.
Another of memory’s treasured holdovers is the basket of misshapen broken up kitchen-made crackers, excellent when fizzed with a swallow of Coke or especially when dipped in the generous bowls of ranch dressing. Easily over-indulged in, and returned to even once the meal is in progress, these had the same draw and craving for gustatory attention as, say, tortilla chips and salsa at a Mexican eatery...although usually not as well-complemented to whatever the main dish might be!
Every once in a while, I yearn a bit to attempt the ol’ copycat recipe. After, oh, 20 years who knows how close to the original any of these meager efforts might be? But there is joy in the sentimental journeys, bolstered by warm memories that center more on the people with whom those good times unfolded from high school and college and in my teaching years up through my doctoral studies, over and above how much the food might have appealed.
As we edged our way to the end of 2022, and the ease of a holiday schedule triggered playful pursuits, I set my sights on those lovable crackers. The first choice was just to make soda crackers, and who better to turn to than those experts at King Arthur?
Not quite ready for bed last Thursday night, the time seemed right to prepare the cracker dough, which seemed reasonably straightforward, and in this case also well-timed, because an overnight slow-rising rest in the fridge is called for. Friday morning I home-batched about a cup of fresh ranch dressing, in keen anticipation, and Friday afternoon I baked the crackers. Clearly not rolled out quite thin enough, and I went ahead and cut them as the recipe directed, rather than baking them in bigger sheets to be rougly broken up...but they were excellent delivery mechanisms for the winning batch of ranch.
In the meantime, I had also renewed my online search efforts, turning up no testable recipes and finding other people’s recipe inquiries had mostly remained unanswered. Interestingly, as developer/restauranteur Marty Kotis from Greensboro has reestablished and resurrected a single location for the Darryl’s brand, he has responded favorably to the clamoring of customers by searching, researching, digging deep, and talking to past staffers and, it appears, has brought back an updated version of those crackers. Shrouded still in secrecy, though.
A snippet saved from the defunct Eat It North Carolina blog said, “Darryl’s infamous crackers are a story unto themselves. As Kotis and his crew were getting prepped for the grand reopening, they realized that the original recipe for the Darryl’s crackers had gotten lost in the shuffle. In an effort to recreate the original recipe, Kotis got in touch with a bunch of former Darryl’s employees and others who had been involved with the recipe in the past and consulted with them to help piece together the original recipe. All of the hard work paid off because they nailed it.”
However, as a former Darryl’s manager says, the crackers were just pizza dough rolled thin and baked, with salt on top. From an article on the now-defunct Chowhound comes this quote: “The crackers were simply pizza dough rolled thin on a sheet pan...hit it with a pizza docker and a sprinkle of kosher salt..... we had to bake four or five 55-gal trashcans full to get ready for a busy night...”
Well, that reduces the mystique down to an utterly believable but also unremarkable genesis of these tasty treats, and maybe all their wood-fired pizzas were in fact hand-crafted and lovingly kneaded and spun in the kitchen. But I also wonder if this suspected pizza dough cracker-source came from a food service supplier...and it won’t hurt my fond memories a single bit.
"Gourmet Soda Crackers," from PJ Hamel of King Arthur Baking. Accompanying blog post, "Worth Their Salt: Gourmet Soda Crackers," published 29 March 2010.
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