These cheese straws are good with dips or salads, or just as a tasty snack.
The Recipe
Ingredients:
- 200g Plain flour
- 50g butter, chilled
- 100g mature cheese
- Half a teaspoon of mustard powder
- Pinch of salt
- Cold water, to mix
Method:
Mix the flour, salt and mustard together in a large bowl. Cut the butter into small cubes and mix it in so that the cubes are all separate and coated with flour.
Grate the cheese - I'm using a mixture of two-thirds mature farmhouse cheddar (for flavour) and one third red Leicester (for colour).
Add the cheese into the mixture and toss together so that the cheese doesn't form clumps.
Add small amounts of water and stir in until the mixture starts to come together into a soft dough - stop before it becomes at all sticky.
Preheat the oven to 150C
Turn the mixture out onto a floured surface and knead it - flattening and folding over with your hands until it forms a single piece of dough
keep going just until you can no longer see distinct lumps of butter in the dough.
Roll out the dough to a little over half a centimetre thick. Cut into strips about 1cm wide.
Place the pieces on a greased cookie sheet (curl them into spirals or twists if you like) and bake in the oven for 10 minutes, or until golden brown - they should puff up a little as they cook.
Optionally, remove them from the oven a minute before they're done and grate a little more cheese over them, then bake for just one more minute to melt and crisp up the extra cheese.
