Chocolate Covered Graham Crackers (with Sea Salt)

A few weeks ago I bought a box of high-end chocolate covered graham crackers at a discount store. We ate them, carefully measured out one per sister every night, and still they didn't last more than a week.  It seems to me that the ingredients aren't expensive -- or are only as expensive as the chocolate you use, and they can't be hard to make.

They aren't.

1) Start with a box of crackers and some nice chocolate. I used a half pound of Callebaut dark chocolate from Whole Paycheck, but people online recommend baking chips.

The still-wrapped-in-plastic chocolate - under/behind the chunk o'chocolate - is bittersweet, which I bought by accident. Rather than add sugar (making the "easy" process more difficult and trickier for flavor's sake), I decided I'll just have to make a cake or chocolate cream pie for my birthday and use it up then. 

2) If the chocolate isn't chipped, cut it up in about the same size pieces, so it melts quickly and evenly. Put the chocolate in the top of a double boiler (I used a metal bowl over a tightly fitting pan) and let the water slowly come to a boil. Leave the water simmering (not boiling) through the whole task.

3) Prepare cookie sheets by covering them with wax paper and set them near the pan, so you don't drip.

The gourmet mass-marketed crackers come in squares; I chose to go with fingers, which are both easier to eat and offer more surface area to coat with chocolate. One online source of this recipe points out it is good to use wax or parchment paper for this job - not racks, which sound cleaner, but just waste chocolate because it drips off the cracker, and coats the rack, and makes it hard to remove the cracker from the rack once the chocolate has hardened.

You can see the steam - I didn't follow my own rules and keep the water to a simmer. The danger of boiling water is partly burning the chocolate and partly water condensing in the pan, which can cause the chocolate to "seize". I can't remember at the moment what seizing is (gets too hard? never hardens?) but it's bad.

4) Encourage the chocolate to melt by stirring it up with a spatula. This has the benefit of adding another utensil that must be licked clean at the end of the job.

5) Here's the fun part -- drop the crackers whole, in handfuls, into the chocolate, and swirl them around carefully.  Pick each one out with a fork -- tapping the fork on the side of the pan, so the extra chocolate on the bottom drips off -- and lay the chocolate-covered cracker on the wax paper.  If you so desire, sprinkle the cracker with some large-flaked sea salt. I so desired.

6) Repeat 5 until you've used up all your chocolate or all your crackers.  Bits of cracker can be saved to become graham cracker crust for Cherry-Lemon IceBox Pie. Extra chocolate can be licked up during cleaning.

I made some chocolate-covered raisins out of the remainders of the chocolate.

The half pound of chocolate I used made a little more than two dozen well-coated "fingers" -- a little more than one third of a box of graham crackers. Disappointing.  Still, they are easy enough to make that I'll be able to do it quickly once I've got more chocolate.