Instructions

1. Stir the flax into the water on its own and leave it. Flax throws a gel around each seed as it hydrates, and that gel is the only thing holding these together — there is no flour and no egg here.
2. It is ready for the rest when it mounds on a spoon like a thick pudding. Ten to fifteen minutes usually does it, and cold water takes longer than warm.
3. Fold in both sesames, the salt, thyme and garlic powder. Keeping the toasted seeds out until this point is what stops them going soft in the soak.
4. Spread the batter on a lined tray to no more than 6 mm, and get it genuinely even. A thick patch will still be soft when the thin ones have gone past crisp into brittle.
5. Score the sheet into squares before it goes in, running a bench scraper through to the liner. Scoring a finished sheet just shatters it into shards.
6. Dehydrate at 43 °C for 18 hours, turning the whole sheet onto mesh once the top is firm. The underside sits on solid plastic and will not dry until it is exposed.
7. They are done when a square snaps with a click and shows no darker band through the break. A crisp that bows before it gives has water left in the middle.
8. Cool them on the mesh and stack them in a tin with paper between the layers. They hold their snap for about three weeks, after which they start taking moisture back out of the air.