What you need
Lynn lays it all out before she starts: the little crackers, one cup of butter, two teaspoons of vanilla, half a teaspoon of cinnamon, one cup of brown sugar and just a little salt. She says her granny used the same crackers in stew.
The crackers come in a nine ounce bag and she uses the whole thing. They are the tiny round ones, and she holds one up because they look like miniature soda crackers, only round.
For pans she wants a big sheet with parchment paper, big enough to lay the crackers out flat instead of stacked, and for the caramel a good thick sturdy pot, because sugar sticks very easy.
Getting the crackers ready
The oven goes on early. She says to preheat it to 350 and let it come up while everything else gets ready, then opens the bag and spreads the crackers over the lined sheet.
She spreads them as evenly as she can, and explains that the parchment is there so the sugar does not get all over the pan. It is not fussy work, though, and she says one or two touching or stacked is fine as long as most of them are in a single layer.
How Lynn cooks the caramel
The butter goes in first, two sticks, which is the one cup the recipe calls for, over medium low so it does not burn. Hers is straight out of the refrigerator, so she says to give it a minute to start melting.
Then one cup of brown sugar, packed real good and tight, which in her kitchen is brown sugar she made herself in an earlier video. She notes that dark brown would work but light brown is what this recipe calls for, and once the butter has started melting she stirs the sugar in and lets it dissolve.
With the butter mostly melted she adds half a teaspoon of cinnamon and then two teaspoons of vanilla, mixing after each. From there it is a matter of cooking it until it changes color and thickens, stirring the whole time so the brown sugar does not stick and burn.
She will not put a number on the stovetop time. She says all stoves are different, so watch for a foamy look and a lighter color, which she says usually takes around three minutes, and then moves the pot off the heat once it has that thickness.
Pouring, salting and baking
She gives it one more stir off the heat and warns that the pot and the sugar are both real hot at this point, then drizzles the caramel over the crackers with the oven already preheating at 350.
A spatula or a big spoon spreads it across, moving the crackers around enough to coat them without mixing them up too much. She says it bakes around five to nine minutes and coats the crackers better as it bubbles.
Before they go in, the salt: she salts the tops lightly, using pink salt, and says kosher or plain white salt would do. It is not much, and she calls it the thing that gives them the taste you are after, so do not skip the pinch of salt.
Out of the oven and how they keep
Lynn pulls hers at eight minutes because she does not want them to get too brown, then stirs them around a little to break them apart. She is pleased that every single cracker picked up some of the caramel.
Then comes the waiting. She says to let them cool around ten minutes, and that is what turns them crunchy: after ten minutes she can hear the crunch and says they are not soggy at all.
For the cookout she puts some in a little jar and keeps the extras in an airtight container to refill it. She reckons there is maybe five dollars in the whole batch, if that.