Instructions

1. Soak the sunflower seeds and the sun-dried tomatoes in separate bowls of water, giving the seeds about four hours and the tomatoes three. In the same bowl the tomatoes dye the seeds and the seeds take on a flavour that muddies the batch.
2. Grind the flax seeds to a coarse meal just before you need it. Whole flax passes through you untouched, and ground flax goes rancid within days, so this is not a step to do ahead.
3. Drain both and process the sunflower seeds, sun-dried tomatoes, dates, olive oil, jalapeno and salt to a thick paste. The dates are doing structural work here as much as sweetening — they are sticky enough to bind a dough with no grain in it.
4. Pulse in the fresh tomatoes, ground flax and basil, and stop as soon as the mixture is even. Blend the basil any longer and it goes black and bitter against the tomato.
5. Spread the mixture 6 mm thick on lined trays and level it with a wet spatula. An uneven sheet is the main reason these come out half brittle and half bendy.
6. The opening pass is 63 °C, held 2 hours. That high setting drives the surface water off fast so the sheet sets firm enough to handle, which is the only thing this stage is for.
7. Cut the firm sheet into crackers, peel them off the liner, and lay them straight onto mesh for the second stage at 46 °C for 8 hours. The lower setting protects the oils in the sunflower and flax, and the mesh lets the undersides finish.
8. A finished cracker snaps rather than bending and has no darker band through the middle when you break one. Judge a cold one; these come off the mesh feeling firmer than they are.
9. Keep them in an airtight tin and eat them within two weeks. Ground flax and sunflower oil both turn quickly, and a stale cracker here tastes of oil paint rather than simply going soft.