When we started trialing quinoa, I got very excited. I knew that quinoa would offer a lot of variety in Zac’s diet (and, eventually, mine), and to start with I wanted to make him his very first teething cracker.
I had seen a few recipes for homemade teething biscuits before, but when it came time to make this I just “winged it”, so I don’t know how much this will resemble other teething cracker recipes out there. All I know is that it worked, and Zac LOVED it! (By the way, I have heard of teething biscuits and teething crackers – anyone know what the difference is? I’m using the terms interchangeably!)
It’s so simple, too!
We started Zac’s quinoa trial with cooked quinoa flakes. I followed the directions on the box and wound up with 1 cup of cooked quinoa. His trial only used 1 tsp. of quinoa for the first day, so that was a lot of quinoa shoved in the fridge!
Cooked quinoa flakes are very moist, of course, so I added quinoa flour to help turn it into a dough.
That wasn’t quite enough to get the consistency right, so I added some uncooked quinoa flakes and mixed it together and voila! A dough!
Making a dough
I rolled it out somewhere between 1/8th and 1/4th of an inch thick on a sheet of parchment paper. It was really sticky, so I actually used a sheet of parchment paper on top, too. That kept things nice and neat!
Rolled dough
After it was in a nice, flat piece, I cut it into small rectangular shapes with a pizza cutter.
Then, just to be tidy, I pulled away all the odd shaped pieces and re-rolled and re-cut them until I had mostly neat little rectangles to cook.
Nifty rectangles
At the time, I was making a pot roast, which is cooked at 300 degrees. Since I don’t have a nifty double oven, I just threw the crackers in at the same temperature, hoping it would work. Turns out, some time between 45-60 minutes at a low temperature made them PERFECT.
I let them cool on a cooling rack for a few minutes, then took the whole sheet of parchment paper off the cookie sheet and let them cool the rest of the way.
Thanks to pre-cutting them, they snapped apart into cute little rectangular crackers just the right size for Zac’s little mouth!
Yummy teething biscuit/crackers!
Jed even started snagging them off the counter, asking for “More crackers, peese, Mommy!” Darrel tried them and said they were a really good cracker; he remarked that they didn’t even have any of the aftertaste that quinoa items can sometimes have.
So this is a definite winner in my house! I hope it works well in yours, too!
(And I really hope Zac can handle quinoa when we reintroduce it later on…he LOVED these crackers!!)
- 1 c. cooked quinoa flakes
- ⅔ c. quinoa flour
- ½ c. uncooked quinoa flakes
- Preheat oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Cook a batch of quinoa flakes per package instructions. (Mine suggests ⅓ c. flakes and 1 c. water.)
- Portion out 1 c. of the cooked quinoa flakes in a bowl.
- Add the quinoa flour and uncooked quinoa flakes to the cooked quinoa flakes in the bowl and mix together completely.
- Lay dough on a sheet of parchment paper; lay another sheet of parchment paper on top and roll the dough out to a thickness between ⅛th and ¼th of an inch.
- Using a pizza cutter, cut the dough into whatever shapes and sizes you would like.
- Slide the sheet of parchment paper on to a cookie sheet, remove the top sheet of parchment paper.
- Place in the oven and cook for 45-60 minutes, depending on how brown and crispy you would like them.
- Hand your baby a healthy, wholesome teething cracker to gnaw!
Do you have a great, allergy-friendly teething cracker recipe? Please share your tips!
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