The Healthfulness of Cereal Packets

Less You

Peanut butter continues to pervade American cuisine. You might have noticed that I’m already on my third different peanut butter cereal here. There’s peanut butter in many of the sugary chocolate treats. The PB&J is the standard food for parents who can’t work out what to serve. And really, it’s a very, very good choice: I believe that you can get all the nutrients you need to survive if you eat enough PB&J sandwiches. Although I am also told that you can also get your daily recommended amounts of every vitamin, mineral, carb, liquid, salt, and so on, from 19 pints of Guinness and one glass of orange juice.  So perhaps being able to get all the nutrients you require shouldn’t be your sole criteria on what to serve.

I am complaining again about different specious health claims today, also peanut butter related. Today I’m writing about Peanut Butter Cheerios. And, I will be honest, I haven’t much to say about them. This is in part because Beth ate most of the pack whilst I was eating other cereals. It is also because they’re pretty unremarkable.

They’re like Cheerios, with a little bit of peanut butter flavour. That is it. There’s not enough peanut butteryness. But they’re not nasty. There’s nothing actually wrong, but also nothing in the least bit exciting. I’m hoping that perhaps some others in the incredibly varied Cheerios line – at last count I saw something like 10 different varieties of Cheerios on the shelves – will turn out better.

One thing that we did discover they were good for was mixing in to other things. Into fruit salad or yoghurt to give a bit of texture, without being overwhelmingly sweet, or offensive, like other cereals are. But that’s damning with faint praise: I should be judging them as a breakfast cereal and, whilst not failing the test, they aren’t bringing any great excitement to the party.

Less Peanut Butter

On to my specious healthfulness whinge. I notice on the pack that we have a claim: “More Grains. Less You.” Is there any plausible explanation for how more grains makes you lose weight? Do you drop the pounds by eating corn and wheat? Or is it the whole-grain-ness? Perhaps fiber makes you shit more, but surely that isn’t a sustainable method of losing weight.

Sure, fiber’s good for you.  I wouldn’t dispute that. But there’s a very big difference between healthy and slimming.

It seems to be part of the classic stylings of the cereal packet: to make claims that are sufficiently vague that you can’t quite pin them down for being misleading, but which if you examine them in any detail at all, even in their vaguest form they seem to be utter nonsense.

It turns out that Cheerios (as I guess most people in the US know) have decided to work hard at their vagueness. In the past they’ve been told by the pharmaceutical regulation body to change the wording on their packets. They had claimed that Cheerios helped reduce cholesterol. And that meant they were marketing themselves as a drug. And that meant they had to undergo far, far stricter tests  and guidelines than just being something people eat.

Cheerios, unsurprisingly, walked back from that precipice very quickly and have toned their language down to much more unproveable claims.

Boringcomb

Excellent source of boredom

A couple of weeks ago we left Palm Springs after staying there for a month and a half. We really enjoyed our time in the desert, with the fantastic San Jacinto mountains looming 10,000 feet over our heads, the almost omnipresent beautiful weather, the stunning cactus and desert scenery, the golf and some beautiful modernist architecture in a ton of residential homes.

From that, you’d think that I loved Palm Springs. But that would be a slight misapprehension. Greater Palm Springs is an area that has nearly half a million residents. Palm Springs, the town, has a mere 40,000 or so. And whilst we enjoyed being in Palm Springs city, and whilst we loved being in the desert, the greater metropolitan area is dreary.

It holds so much promise: 125 golf courses (but they all look the same, have nothing to do with the desert, and cost a fortune). The newer, shinier, more recently built houses – but if you thought they’d carry on with the cool modernist aesthetic, you’d be mistaken; instead they’ve just plonked down McMansions or miserable retirement communities on the golf courses without the slightest thought for how it might look. There are a ton of restaurants, except they’re all chains, or bad steak houses. It’s just a whole lot of nothing. There’s no “there” there.

Which brings me, as a tenuous link, to Post’s Honeycomb. Kerry visited us in Palm Springs and generously bought a couple of packs of cereal for me. This is the first, and I was excited. You’d think an American breaksfast cereal called “honeycomb” would be awesome: sweet, crunchy and wonderful. Perhaps like a delightfully bad-taste version of a Crunchy.

Sadly not. It is the cereal equivalent of greater Palm Springs. It is deeply underwhelming. It has no character. No excitement.

A bowl of Meh

The cereal itself is hugely puffed up, and massively inflated (the only cereal so far where a portion is a cup and a half, because so much of it is air). It’s shaped more like cartoon snowflake than honeycomb. This gigantism is actually really annoying, as it’s hard to shovel it into the mouth fast enough. And you get very little of any note with any bite.

The texture is OKish, but no better. It’s crunchy, which is good. But it’s not that nice, biting crunch. It’s a bit soft and airy. It’s not quite like eating Styrofoam peanuts, but it’s not far off. If you go halfway between a Styrofoam peanut and some stale toast, you’re probably on the right tracks.

The flavour too is sort of OK. But that’s as good as I could say. It wasn’t offensive, but it was very mild. Although there was honey, there wasn’t very much of it. Although there was cereal, there wasn’t much. Mostly there was little flavour at all, and at the base it was that bland, cardboard taste that seems to be the root of some of the worst cereals here.

As I mentioned already, it’s the cereal equivalent of Rancho Mirage or Indian Wells. You think it all sounds good, the component parts all look great,  but it is so much less than the sum of its parts, just leaving you bored and disappointed.

The Golden Years

Box of Golden Grahams

Long ago, back in the 1970s and 80s at the fag end of the cold war, Britain was covered in US Air Force bases. Full of F14s and B52s and Tomahawk missiles holding the second line against the coming Soviet invasion, able to strike back once the tanks started rolling into Germany. It was a strange era. Every time we heard the F111s flying out of Upper Heyford we thought the nuclear Armageddon had started.

As well as containing the tools of the imminent demise of mankind, these places also contained shops. Shops stocked with all the obscure US products that you couldn’t find in the UK; and not only that, they were highly subsidised.  It was rare to find an opportunity to get inside a base, except when there were airshows, and then access was restricted. But every so often we managed. To  us, as a family, where we had spent some time in the US in my extreme youth (and my parents had spent longer before I was born), it was a treasure trove of incredible excitements such as grape soda and Budweiser. It’s bewildering to think that I was actually delighted to find these things. The world was much less global back then.

Amongst the things we tended to buy, on those rare but happy visits to the USAF’s shops, were Golden Grahams. I have no recollection whether my parents discovered these in California in the 60s, or much later on future trips to the US, but I do recall them occasionally making it into our cereal cupboard and being a rare and much loved treat.

So how would they fare when I came back to them so much later? A lot of things I loved as a kid are the kind of thing that you might love as a kid but which are actually pretty nasty to an adult palate. The Golden Graham’s pass the adult palate test pretty well.

Nostalgia for Upper Heyford

I’m sure they’re entirely familiar to my US readers, but UK readers are probably not so familiar. Graham crackers are, well, a cracker made out of wheat. Not too strong in flavour, but quite earthy and a little sweet. They’re the basis for the legendary smores that we often hear of in the UK, and in that regard perhaps the closest analogy would be a digestive biscuit. Certainly in terms of ubiquity.

As a cereal they’ve used Graham cracker material and made it into a Shreddies like lattice. The “golden” part of the name is a honey addition.  It’s not the usual lightweight honey you often get in cereal but a darker, almost burnt sort of flavour, bordering on being caramelised. The cereal is like an unmalted Shreddies, I guess the caramelised honey replacing the malt.  And it’s great. It’s really, really good.

It’s a dense cereal, one that sinks, that’s filling, that tastes good. It tastes like it’s made from real stuff, not from the magical chemicals in a lot of US cereal. It actually sets you up nicely for the new day.

There’s something earthy here in the graham cracker which works fantastically with the burnt honey, giving a great full flavour and just a hugely satisfying feeling when eating it. I can see entirely why we used to be so excited when we found them.

Frankly delicious, and something I’ll be revisiting once I’ve emptied the rest of the cereal aisle.

The First Deadly Cin

Cinnabons

There’s a whole category of cinnamon based breakfast cereals in the US that don’t seem to exist in Europe. It’s an omission that I fail to understand, because cinnamon is a great friend of those who like sweet flavours and don’t want to be overpowered by sugar.

The first of these that I am trying is Kellogg’s Cinnabon cereal. Cinnabon is absolutely everywhere in the US. I think you can find them occasionally in Britain, usually in those giant soulless shopping malls that surround London. They tend to run little stands and sell cinnamon buns, as the name might imply.

These are big, doughy buns absolutely smothered and swamped in sugar, with cinnamon as the least unhealthy element in the mix. And they’re delicious, if overwhelming.

In the US, the cinnabon has escaped the mall and is now all over the grocery stores, in all kinds of frozen bread products and, I suspect, in coffee creamers and coffees and probably cookies and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a Cinnabon pasta some time soon.

Why anyone thought it was a good idea to create a breakfast cereal out of these is beyond my understanding. It is, I think, a lack of imagination on the part of US cereal manufacturers – something I can’t normally accuse them of – to desperately try and make a breakfast cereal out of something else (see: Eggo Waffles, Reese’s Puffs, previously).

This time they’ve actually done a very good job. The Cinnabon cereal is genuinely delicious. They’re miniature versions of the cinnamon roll, or perhaps mini-Princess-Leia-hairs (and would be a good suggestion for anyone who is trying to make edible Star Wars characters...), and therefore look a little odd.

In terms of flavour, they’re sweet but not as sweet as the Cinnabon buns – either that or you eat them in small enough portions for the sugar to not completely overpower in the way that the buns do. And they don’t have that stickiness of the sugary frosting which helps.

The texture overall is pretty good. They’re crunchy, and stay crunchy in the milk. They’re not too aerated and therefore don’t float, which means you can get at the milk beneath. There’s a density that means they’re actually fairly satisfying to eat.

The remnants of a lego Leia genocide

The cinnamon flavour is quite strong, but not so much that it gets up your nose. You can just about taste some kind of grain at the base of the cereal, too, which is something I like; something that makes a breakfast feel breakfast. I like the fake sugary notes, but I prefer them to be balanced with just a little bit of something real (although here, not so real that I could actually tell you what the grain at the base of the Cinnabon is).

So, here we have something of a winner. It tastes good, it has a good texture, it’s pretty artificial and stupid. It seems to score highly on all counts. 

Nobody Can Eat Three Mini-Wheats

Mini box of Mini-Wheats

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, and maybe before (but I’m too young to know) there was a long running advertising campaign featuring what appeared, to the undiscerning British eye, globe bestriding sporting colossuses (colossi?) such as Brian Clough and Ian Botham claiming that “Nobody could eat three Shredded Wheat”.

Back then, in Britain, the only size of Shredded Wheat was massive, fist sized things. Over time, Shredded Wheat bite size came to dominate, to the extent that I can barely remember the original full sized ones.

Over here in America, Beth decided to buy me – to help with this mission, although I don’t know if it’s cheating – a selection pack of single serving sizes of various cereals. The first one I went for was the Frosted Mini Wheats.  Now, I’ve had a long, rigorous survey of two, maybe three supermarkets, and I’ve not noticed any full sized wheats. Perhaps America only actually has mini-wheats, although the name would seem odd considering that most companies aren’t desperate to advertise the mini-ness of their products, unless the mini-ness is in comparison to a previous version that was unwieldy – like the previously mentioned original Shredded Wheat.

Mini-portion of Mini-wheats

Upon opening the box, I was taken back to that advertising campaign of my youth – because a single serving of Mini-Wheats (frosted) seems to have about three shredded wheat. It’s a shockingly tiny portion. Now, I’ve been mocking serving sizes all through this, but this is just farcical. Nobody can eat three mini-wheats, because they don’t put three in the box.

The size issue aside, which can be easily resolved by buying a normal box and pouring out a proper sized helping, the mini wheats are actually very good. But we all know that. I think everyone the world over knows the plain, fairly pleasant wheaty flavour and how it desperately needs sugar to stop it tasting like cardboard; and how the strands of the wheat can be desperately, inedibly dry without milk, but can turn to a mush when left in too long. But in that exact moment of perfect balance, turns out to be really delicious.

On the positive side of the single-serve packet, there are much fewer of the crumbs in the bottom that make the last helping you get from a normal package turn into something the consistency of wallpaper glue.

Anyway, here’s a short review in honour of the tiny portion of cereal. Perfectly nice, very familiar, the kind of cereal you could eat every day for breakfast but not the kind to get you giddy with excitement.

Andy’s Southern Breakfast Companion

If I had any loyal readers, and if they were still reading after such a long break, they may have been wondering why there have been so few posts.

There are a number of reasons, amongst which are that I’ve actually been working hard (the pretty animation at the top of this news report is mine: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16657122) ; and that I’m incredibly lazy about writing. Primarily, though, it’s because we were travelling a lot, and in particular travelling in the South. Which means both lots of breakfasts out, and also lots of the specific foods of the American south.

Americans reading this will wonder why I’m bothering, but the people of Britain are often baffled by southern breakfast foods which sound, to the British ear, utterly nasty. Why would people eat grits, we wonder? It just sounds bad. What on earth would possess you to put gravy on your biscuits?

I hope I’ll be able to add just a little extra layer of information.

The Biscuit Confusion

Some biscuits, yesterday

First up are biscuits. Back in the UK, biscuits are cookies. On the whole, biscuits are dry cookies – perhaps the closest thing in the US are Graham crackers. The idea that you’d eat them for breakfast is a bit odd. The thought is putting fried chicken between them is baffling. And the concept of covering them with gravy really churns the stomach.

Here in the US, biscuits, which are now pretty universal but which started as a southern speciality, are bready, soft, buttery delights. The closest UK equivalent is the scone, I’d say. But it’s a scone that’s not sweet, and which is lighter and made with much more butter (as well as with buttermilk rather as the base). Frankly, the best biscuits are made mostly with butter, with just a thin fabric of flour holding them together. Eaten warm, they melt in the mouth and are utterly wonderful.

These days, as I mentioned above, they’re getting to be ubiquitous – you can get them in fast food restaurants, in KFC and McDonalds and the rest, and if there’s any justice in the world you’ll be getting them in the UK soon  - but traditionally they were eaten in the south with gravy. The gravy here is not the dark, beefy, Bisto kind of gravy we’re familiar with in the UK. It’s much lighter, basically a white gravy, made with a flour base, and ladled over the biscuits to soak them. Now, this can be a bit more of an acquired taste, particularly as the gravy is often made with sausage meat and then given a bit of spice. Personally, I find it pretty delicious, but it is a very fatty gravy, and not to everyone’s taste.

Grits

Uncooked, unappetising, grits

For Christmas, Beth bought me the selection box of grits from Quaker. It is appropriate that they’re made by Quaker because porridge really is the obvious comparison. Grits are best described as a corn meal porridge. It’s a fairly coarsely ground corn meal heated in milk (or water, I think, for the purists), and comes out with a vaguely gritty, crunchy texture - a bit like slightly undercooked rice.

Beth reminds me that perhaps the other really close comparison is polenta. Grits are very similar to polenta.

The flavour is pretty bland on its own, although like biscuits they becomes a good vessel for carrying butter to the mouth. This means that plain grits appear to be all about the texture which – like sausage gravy - appears to be pretty polarising – some love the texture, some really hate it, although oddly I find myself a bit indifferent, really. The Quaker variety pack comes with pre-flavoured grits, though – some plain, some butter, some cheese and some bacon. I’ve not yet dared to try the bacon after the astonishingly nasty fake-cheese flavour on the cheddar version, which I’d really suggest that all sane people avoid.  They’d probably be great with real cheese, mind you. The pre-flavoured butter ones work well, so I guess it’s just a case of making sure you get the right fake flavours.

Cooked, still rather charmless, grits

Beth tells me a sort-of-entertaining story from 1990s southern Africa. Grits are made with ground yellow corn, and the mealie-pap that is common across southern Africa is ground white corn. During a period of famine, US charities sent large amounts of grits as aid but because they were the wrong colour apparently they were turned down, under the suspicion that the US government was messing with it and trying to kill them.

Hoecakes

Another food item that would have bad connotations to the English, this is not actually anything to do with prostitutes. I have learned that the Hoecake is actually identical to the Johnnycake and is not a southern speciality at all. It’s just that the term Hoecake is a southern usage. It appears that they start off fairly similar to grits, as corn-meal, but are then cooked on a griddle.

Traditionally, in the south, they were cooked on hoes in the farms, which is how they got their name.

Ho, ho, hoecakes

We only had them one evening, at Paula Deen’s restaurant in Savannah, so I’m not sure they’re actually a breakfast food.  They were very delicious, and certainly taste like they should be breakfast food. Fried and cornbready and delicious and probably wonderful with butter and maple syrup.

Again for the British readers, a few words on Paula Deen: she is a pretty ubiquitous TV chef who’s schtick appears to be “add lots and lots of butter and sugar to everything, and that will make it delicious, y’all”, which is an entirely fair point, but seems a little shallow to have built an entire culinary empire on. Then again, Jamie Oliver has built an empire on “buy really good fresh ingredients, and then don’t cook them too long, and they’ll taste great”, so perhaps the public need spokespeople for the blindingly obvious. Miss Deen, meanwhile, recently announced that she has diabetes, which some view as ironic. More ironic, perhaps, is that I think I heard she’s now a spokesperson for a diabetes drug: given that she has spent her career encouraging people to eat a diabetes inducing diet. If this were politics, someone might call “conflict of interest”.

Beignets

Finally, something that doesn’t sound nasty to British ears, these are a speciality of New Orleans. Like the French suggests, they’re basically doughnuts, but in New Orleans, they’re fried, square pillows of dough, very, very light and smothered in powdered sugar. And like most of the other things I’ve mentioned, utterly delicious – although they’re served with the very disturbing chickory coffee that seems popular in New Orleans, too, which brings them down a notch.

A word on bacon

This is just another note to British in America, and not a specifically southern thing. You can’t get back bacon here. Don’t bother trying. All bacon in America is streaky bacon (which is also delicious, and generally cooked until it’s very crunchy). They might try and tell you that Canadian bacon is back bacon, but it’s not. Canadian bacon is perhaps more similar to ham than to back bacon. It’s closer than streaky, but it’s definitely not the real thing.  So, Britons in America, I suggest you just embrace the lovely, crunchy, thin streaky bacon of the US when you’re here, be a bit sad that you’ve lost all the great bacon variety that you’re used to, and enjoy back bacon when you’re in Blighty.

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Well, after all that, it’s time to get back to the regular programming and some writing on immensely sugary American breakfast cereals because the drive across the country seems to have shrunk the waistband on all my clothes and I need to start the fightback.

Crunch Time

A packet of crunchy goodness

We’ve been in the Deep South: Savannah, Georgia. Georgia is famous for its peanuts, for Planters Peanuts, for Jimmy Carter, Peanut Farmer. Savannah, meanwhile, is an old, stately, coastal and port town. It still has a large fishing fleet and huge container boats coming in along the river. It’s stunning to look at, full of trees covered in Spanish moss and old brick pavements (sidewalks for the Americans). Its wealth originally came from its place as the export port for all the slave picked cotton.

So, in a world of peanuts and boats, what better way to honour where I am than eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch. The original Cap’n Crunch is one of Beth’s absolute favourites, the only cereal that got shipped back to the UK with us. We’ll no doubt come to Cap’n Crunch Original later, but it does mean that I had some preconceived notions. These weren’t so much about the taste than about the Captain (or, I think I mean, Cap’n). In my mind he was a pirate. I would think kids would be excited for Pirate Cereal. It turns out that the Cap’n is a more modern seafaring Captain, and looks like he’s on a fishing boat (for British readers, he has more of the disturbing Captain Birds-Eye tendency than the violent Blackbeard tendency).

I’m not sure that the kids really want fishing boat cereal. The idea of stinky fishing boats, of rotting herring, just won’t lure in the children, I’d have thought. But the brand seems to be massively popular.

Rightly so, it turns out. Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch is pretty much delicious. It’s by far the best of the fake, fun, kiddy cereals I’ve had so far. It lives up to its name, too. The crunch is spectacular. I think I disturbed the neighbourhood eating my way through it.  I don’t quite know how it’s achieved, but the cereal seems to be very dry as a basis, and not nearly as absorbent as some, so it remains very, very crunchy in milk.

The flavour is great, too. It’s peanutty, perhaps more peanut than peanut butter, but I’m not going to fuss about those kinds of details – we’re again, as we were with the Reese’s Puffs, in the same flavour space as the cacahuette puffs that you get in French supermarkets and on bars in Germany. It’s a good peanut, too. There may be lots of sugar in the cereal, but it’s acting as a flavour enhancer, I’d say, rather than as a flavour disguiser.

A bowl of crunchy yum

Somewhere beneath the sugar and peanut is a cereal base, but it’s too swamped by all the other stuff for me to really be able to identify it. Whatever it is, and I’m sure I’ll get to it when we get around to the real Cap’n Crunch, it’s not detrimental to the whole.

One really nice thing about the Cap’n Crunch experience was the aftertaste. For once I wasn’t left with the brutal acrid acid burn in the sides and back of the mouth. It actually felt fairly benign.  I do suspect, though, that if I hadn’t had a second breakfast I would have suffered from a chronic sugar crash.

A good way of overcoming this was to mix the Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunch in with the Wheaties Fuel mentioned in an earlier posting. Mixed together they make a really fantastic breakfast cereal, a mix of fun, sugary, serious, healthy and filling.

All told, the Peanut Butter Crunch turns out to be surprisingly and genuinely nice.