Instructions

1. Stir the flax meal, parmesan, garlic powder and salt together dry, then pour the water in all at once. Added gradually, the flax gels around each splash and you end up working out lumps that did not need to exist.
2. Leave it to stand and stir it every few minutes for a quarter of an hour. Flax meal releases a gel as it hydrates, and that gel is the only thing holding this cracker together — there is no flour and no egg in it.
3. Stop when the mixture mounds on the spoon but still slumps back. Stiffer than that and it will not spread; looser and it runs to the edges of the tray and dries as a wafer.
4. Spread it on a lined tray to an even layer no thicker than a coin, using a wet spatula. Flax paste grabs a dry blade and drags itself into furrows.
5. Score it into squares now, all the way through to the liner. Once it is dry the sheet breaks where it wants to, not where you want it to.
6. Dry at 42 °C for 24 hours, and peel the whole sheet off the liner to flip it once the top is firm enough to hold. The underside sits against the tray and dries at half the speed of the top if it never gets turned.
7. They are finished when a cracker snaps with a clean edge and shows no darker, damper band through the broken face. Test a cooled one — parmesan softens as it warms, so a cracker straight off the tray always feels less crisp than it is.
8. Keep them in a rigid airtight container rather than a bag, and eat them within three weeks. The cheese fat is what limits them: they stay crisp far longer than that, but they start tasting sharp and stale well before they go soft.