I’m not one to spend a lot of money when it comes to eating out, but a girl likes to be spoiled every now and then. A few times a month, I’ll put on some “real clothes” (instead of my WFH clothes) and expect to be rewarded with an interesting cocktail and some tasty snacks. These were recently served at a Tom Colicchio place I went to with friends, and the most amazing thing happened: we were served a cheese platter with salty, crunchy, seeded bread crackers. The amazing thing wasn’t that the crackers were expensive, tasty, and interesting, but rather the realization that anyone can make very similar high-end crackers at home in an air fryer for a fraction of the price.

Whether you like it or not, the air fryer is abysmal for toasting bread, but it’s great for drying bread to a crispy crack. The mini convection oven, with its hot, high-speed winds, is the ideal setting for extracting moisture, and it does it much faster than a conventional oven. This is great news if you have seeded loaves of bread, especially stale ones that you don’t see much of a future in.

I’ve found that, whether they’re packaged in stores or on cheese boards at wine bars, the fanciest crackers tend to be “rustic”: thick, brown bread and loaded with whole grains, seeds, or nuts. While you can turn most breads into pretty good crackers using this technique, I prefer crackers with a denser crumb (few big air pockets) and lots of seeds and nuts. Both have natural oils that toast nicely to release a lot of flavor in the finished cracker, which is more than many other crackers can say for themselves.

As an added bonus, there’s very little technique involved in making a cracking bread cracker. The only challenge is making sure the slice is thin enough, but not so papery that it burns. I’ve found that the best size is to split the average factory slice in half. That’s about a quarter inch thick if you’re slicing an unsliced loaf of bread.