Cheese Straws
Cheese straws are like the homemade version of Cheezits – but better!
Traditionally, folks add cayenne pepper for flavoring, but I like Tobasco hot sauce. And while this recipe calls for cheddar, you can use just about any kind of cheese, be it cheddar, edam, blue cheese, parmesan, gouda, pepper jack, and maybe even asiago. The best choice is to pick your favorite cheese when you make these crackers.
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter, softened
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
4 drops (or more) of Tabasco pepper sauce
Preheat the oven to 300º.
Mix together butter, cheese, flour, salt, garlic powder and Tabasco as best as you can. Some folks would use a food processor, but I don’t have one, so I used my stand mixer’s dough hook attachment to mix until the dough was smooth.
Lightly grease a cookie sheet, then scoop a big wad of dough into a zip baggie, snip off a corner and then squirt the dough into 2-inch logs on your prepared cookie sheet. To make it fancy, twist them a couple of times.
[Idea: Watching TV one night, I saw this lady cool off the dough for about an hour in the fridge, then roll it on a floured surface into a square that was about a 1/4-inch thick. She went on to cut it into smaller squares that measured about 2 or 3 inches square.]
Anyway, bake your cheese straws for 10 to 15 minutes or until lightly browned. Remove from oven (duh) and cool. Store in airtight container.