Waffling on

Real and Fake flavour!

A while back, I was watching Heston Blumenthal’s TV show where he was trying to produce the perfect food for British Airways. Apparently flavours become less pronounced in the pressurised cabin. I checked what the cabin pressure is on a standard airliner, defined as “effective cabin altitude”: generally it’s kept at the equivalent of 7000 feet. The other factor that Blumenthal was concerned about in an aircraft cabin was the very dry air.

Here in Flagstaff, Arizona, at the edge of the Colorado Plateau, we are at 7000 feet. We are in the high desert, with a super-dry atmosphere. It should, effectively, be the same as inside a 747.

This means that we should have the same flavour and taste impairment as your average airline passenger. Blumenthal ran some experiments that suggested that the ability to taste the four standard flavours of western cuisine (sweet, salty, sour and bitter) are heavily suppressed in aeroplane conditions, yet the ability to taste umami (the savoury flavour) is untouched. This means that you should be eating shiitake mushrooms with wasabi and parmesan when you’re at altitude.

What does this all have to do with breakfast cereal? My feeling is that my tastebuds are impaired. Horribly impaired. The second cereal in my attempt to work my way through the aisle is Kelloggs Eggo Cereal. And, disturbingly, I thought it was pretty good.

Prior to tasting it, I wrote this as my prediction:
How is this going to work as a cereal? Well, I honestly have no idea – I think it might be better, earthier, less fake than the Reese’s. Waffle is a fairly plain base flavour. I’m mostly scared of the artificial maple, which might be very chemical indeed if it’s not just sugar syrup. I’m really pretty optimistic, though.

Eggo are a brand of frozen waffles that Beth loves: the kind of thing that has almost no flavour and whose texture is pleasing but deeply artificial. The conversion into a cereal seems a bit bizarre, given that waffles are already a breakfast product. So it appears to be entirely redundant.

To my surprise, the cereal actually tastes quite good. You will see on the packet that they proudly proclaim that the cereal has “natural and artificial flavor” which seems very odd to me as an advertising gimmick (if you think the natural is good, surely you’d want to shut up about the artificial?). And it really scared me. Artificial maple is not always a good thing, and here in the US syrup isn’t even maple at all, but is just a sugar solution.

My guess is that, in finding the Eggo not too sweet, and finding the maple not too disgusting, the altitude is at work here. So I suggest taking my review with a pinch of salt (or, I suppose, parmesan...). I particularly doubt my ability to taste the sugar given how I once again had a sugar-crash a couple of hours after eating. And, unlike the Reese’s, I didn’t overfill my bowl. This time, the portion size isn’t quite as outrageously small. It is one cup – not enough to make you full, but not as laughable as the ¾ cup that Reese’s suggested.

One meagre-looking portion of Eggo

What I could tell of the flavour was that there was nothing waffly at all, the maple was pretty authentic and not too dominant. The texture was nice, but the Eggos got soggy very fast, even faster than I could shovel them into my throat. I think that was the worst of it. They really aren’t bad at all.

One laughable discovery came on the back of the packet. Every “fun” cereal has to have some kind of entertainment on the back of the packet – I suspect the most reading that some people do in a day is the back of the cereal box – and Eggo have come up with a marketing tagline below. Now, I don’t know who thought this up, but surely the target market for this product haven’t been listening to their Huey Lewis and The News mix too often...

The scores on the doors for Kelloggs Eggo Waffle Cereal are as follows:

Integrity: 6 (with altitude related caveats). Good texture, mapleness is solid and realistic, maple and waffle are naturally related flavours so it goes OK. There’s clearly too much sugar for a higher score, given my later-in-the-day shakes.

Fun: 7 – who couldn’t be excited by maple waffle cereal as an idea? And nicely crunchy. Nothing entertaining in the colour department, though.

Only-in-America: 9 – who else would even think of this? The frozen waffle is itself a US-only concoction. Maple is a very American sort of flavour. And the idea of turning a breakfast product into breakfast cereal is something only an American would even consider.