An easy recipe for Homemade Graham Crackers. Made with 100% whole wheat flour and brown sugar, these are so much better than store-bought crackers!
Homemade Graham Crackers are truly something special.
Yes, they are made with ingredients you know and recognize and are not "processed." However, the flavor of homemade graham crackers is far superior to store-bought and totally worth the effort.
How do you make Graham Crackers?
Graham crackers, like many cookies, are made with the creaming method. This means you cream softened fat (butter or shortening) in a mixer with sugar until it is pale in color and fluffy.
Then, add your remaining wet ingredients (in this case, milk, honey and vanilla) and your dry ingredients.
Scrape your dough and knead by hand before forming into two large rectangles. Score the dough before baking, but otherwise leave it uncut.
Bake the crackers until darkened, then break along the score lines.
Or, you can use a pizza wheel to cut out any shapes you want.
Store the baked graham crackers in an airtight container for up to 3 weeks. Or, freeze the crackers for up to 3 months.
Homemade Graham Crackers Recipe
Ingredients
- 2 cups whole wheat flour plus more for dusting (not stone-ground or white whole white flour)
- 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 teaspoon baking soda
- 1/2 teaspoon Salt
- 7 tablespoons butter softened
- 1 cup light brown sugar packed
- 3 tablespoons whole milk
- 1/3 cup honey
- 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
Instructions
To make the dough:
- In a medium bowl, whisk together flour, cinnamon, baking soda and salt. Set aside.
- In a standing mixer fit with the paddle attachment, or with an electric hand mixer, cream butter and sugar together.
- Increase speed to medium and beat until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes. Reduce speed to low and add flour mixture until incorporated and a soft dough forms, about 2 minutes.
- Add the milk, honey and vanilla extract. The dough should be sticky and soft.
- Divide the dough in two discs and wrap both in plastic and chill for at least one hour.
To roll and bake the dough:
- Adjust oven rack to the middle position and preheat oven to 350 degrees. Generously flour your counter or a piece of parchment paper and place one ball of dough in the center.
- Pat into a 5-by-6-inch rectangle, sprinkle with flour, flip, and dust again, Working from the center out and adding more flour as needed, roll the dough until roughly 15-by-11 inches and very thin. Slide onto am aluminum baking sheet and brush away excess flour. Repeat with remaining dough.
- For grocery store look-alike, score each sheet of dough into twelve 2 1/4-by-4 3/4-inch rectangles and dock with a bamboo skewer or the narrow end of a chopstick. Otherwise leave the dough uncut.
- Bake until crackers and firm and darkened, about 10-12 minutes. Immediately cut along the pre-scored lines with a knife, or cut into free-form shapes using a pizza wheel. Cool to room temperature directly on the baking sheets.
- The graham crackers can be stored in an airtight container for up to 3 weeks at room temperature or frozen for up to 3 months.
This dough had too much liquid for the amount of flour used.
Hi. I’m going camping with friends in a few days, so hoping you see this question sooner than that. Must I absolutely use whole milk? This recipe only calls for three tablespoons of it, but I can’t find any container smaller than a quart around here, and for some reason I can’t find whole powdered milk, unless I want a giant vat of it, which I will never use. I don’t drink milk. I really don’t want to end up with a lot of it leftover when I dislike the taste of it so much. Are there any other suggestions? Maybe a lower-fat milk? I have nonfat milk power which I use to bake bread. Will that do? Or can I substitute a rich almond milk, which I’ve noticed behaves exactly the same as regular milk when used in cooking? Then I can share it with my dairy-free friends. Is the fat content ultra-important, or is it just for flavor?
Hi Jennifer, I unfortunately haven’t tried this with any other milks. I have tried several graham cracker recipes, though, and they tend to be super finicky and touchy and prone to disasters. You are welcome to test the recipe with other milks, but I cannot promise what will happen. I’m so sorry about that! I completely understand the dilemma, I can only say that I learned during quarantine that milk can be frozen. Which is not really super helpful since you don’t like it. Sorry about that! -Meggan
Could I roll this dough out into a pie crust shell for a graham cracker pie crust?
Hi Amy, I’m not really sure. Graham cracker crusts usually have extra butter and sugar added. I’m not sure how just plain graham crackers would taste or if it would perform the way you want to. You could definitely try it, but only if you feel adventurous and won’t have your day ruined if it fails! Ha ha! I’d hate for your day to be worse because of one of my recipes. Thanks. -Meggan
I made this exact recipe a few weeks ago and it turned out perfect. Tried again today and it’s a sticky mess!
I must have more than doubled the flour by this point trying to make it come together, adding a bit at a time and getting nowhere. I eventually gave up, made little balls and flattened them onto parchment paper. Let’s see what comes out of the oven!
very delicious cookies ,my children savored them.
make the dough thing not super thin but thin to have them come out crispy if that’s the way you want them. Instead of butter I used avocado oil and they taste very delicious I believe some recipes that include butter you really don’t need to use it you can use oil instead because you will not savor the taste of butter, like in this recipe. Instead shortbread cookies the butter is a must.
I figured it out. Thank you for posting up the recipe!
Made these, they are delicious and addictive! thanks for the [email protected]
Mangos are raining from the trees this time of year. Needing a taste of home, naturally I thought of Graham crackers. I was happy to find a simple recipe given how few fancy I gredients are available here on the coast of Oaxaca. I forgot to fork them, so they puffed a little. They tasted delicious, especially when we made mango cream pie.
For those playing along in Australia- do we have whole wheat flour? I used whole meal flour, which I think is whole-wheat white flour, so the dough didn’t come together at all. I added the other ingredients (used golden syrup instead of honey), and added more milk, 1 tablespoon at a time until it became the sticky dough described. Dough currently resting in the fridge. I’m making NY cheesecake for my birthday and I’m so excited to see how these turn out!
Whole meal and whole wheat flour are the same. I realized this when I first made my Irish boyfriend soda bread
Why does your measurement for cinnamon and baking soda change when you switch between US and Metric?
Hi Ross, I fixed it. I’m so sorry about that. With my original recipe, some readers had issues so we worked on it a lot and tested it and what not. Ultimately we updated it, but we never recalculated the metric conversions. So the amounts you saw for Metric were from the old version of the recipe. So now I’ve recalculated everything and it should work fine. I’m really sorry about that! Thanks for letting me know. -Meggan
My Graham Crackers turned out very chewy and spread out a lot? Any advice
Hi, the narrative discusses molasses, but it’s not listed in the ingredient list or recipe. Am I missing something? Thanks, Jane
Hi Jane, I’m sorry for the change. Readers were having the original recipe fail on them repeatedly, not being able to get the dough to come together. I changed it to a recipe in September, but forgot to change the write up. I’ll do that right away so it is no longer confusing!
What happened to the molasses in the actual recipe???? This is my favorite graham cracker recipe, but it’s changed. I don’t see the molasses anymore. Did you replace it with the honey? There used to not be honey.
Hi Cherri, I’m sorry for the change. Readers were having the original recipe fail on them repeatedly, not being able to get the dough to come together. I changed it to a recipe that I thought had a similar taste but had dough that worked better. I will send you the original recipe via email. Again, I’m very sorry about that. -Meggan
I love graham crackers for a snack. I’m excited to try this because I prefer real food ingredients. Just curious though – why not maple syrup?
Hi Trudy, it’s because of the unique water content and pH of maple syrup. It just doesn’t work in graham crackers. Thanks for your question! -Meggan
Brigettes birthday
Why whole wheat flour and not graham flour?
Hi Jocelyn, graham flour is really hard to find so I started with a recipe that used whole wheat flour. I plan to try to a version with graham flour though, to see if it’s any better. It might make all the difference and be worth hunting down to the people who really want to make these crackers from scratch! Thanks – Meggan
This is clearly the recipe from BraveTart by Stella Parks and is available with appropriate credit given on a number of other sites. I wish you’d follow that lead and acknowledge where you got the recipe from. Not so interested in browsing other recipes here if that’s your typical MO.
You’re right, this is Stella’s recipe. My policy is to cite sources although clearly I didn’t here, and I’m sorry about that. I would never be able to conjure a graham cracker recipe out of thin air. Her recipe is actually really problematic, many readers have had trouble with it and I have too. I’ve tried some of the other top results in Google too and the dough is always so crumbly (chilling helps, but not entirely). I have added the citation, thanks for pointing that out, and I’m still on the hunt for a better recipe that never fails. Thanks and sorry again. -Meggan
I tried desperately to get this dough to come together and I couldn’t. I’m a novice Baker and this was something new but with 2 toddlers running around and being pregnant I couldn’t give it more time and had to chuck it with tears from everyone. Any tips would be greatly appreciated
Hi Toni, I feel terrible. You are living my life – 2 small children and pregnant (congratulations on that!). The last thing you need is a graham cracker recipe to fail for you! I have made it before without issue, so I’m really sorry the dough didn’t come together for you. With baking, the most important thing is to measure the ingredients correctly, but I’m fairly confident you did that. I should add more notes in the recipe about the ingredients. For example, blackstrap molasses does not work as well but I don’t think i wrote that anywhere. Did you use that, by any chance? I hope not. Also, the flour should be whole wheat but not stone-ground or white whole wheat. Is there any chance you used one of those (I hope not since I didn’t explain this clearly). Other than that, everything should be fine. I’m going to make these crackers again next week and see what I can figure out. In the meantime, I am so sorry for ruining the day. I feel terrible. Take care. -Meggan
Can this be modified to make chocolate graham crackers?
Hi Erin, yes! Reduce the whole-wheat flour to 2 1/4 cups (10 ounces), and sift it with 1/3 cup (1 ounce) of cocoa powder (natural or Dutch processed are both fine). Instead of rolling out the dough with flour, roll it out with extra cocoa powder to keep the dark brown color. Otherwise everything else is the same! Thank you and good luck! :D -Meggan
Using baking soda as a leavening agent what does it react with, is it the molasses?
Yes, exactly. Baking soda will react with the molasses. -Meggan