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.

Turning Trix

Box of Trix

We are, at the moment, in Charleston, South Carolina. It is a very pleasant city to be in. At least, it is in winter when the humidity and heat and mosquitoes aren’t out of control. We are told that in summer it turns worse. For the time being, though, it’s pretty delightful. It has the feel, the air, of a Caribbean city, but better maintained, and with more wealth and most of the luxuries that make living in the US easy. It’s full of great restaurants – lots of farm-to-table southern cooking, but refined and elevated. It may have even more really great bars making interesting, but still good, cocktails. It’s easy to get around. The houses are lovely and old and full of character. It’s surrounded by a beautiful harbour full of dolphins. It is, really, a very, very nice place indeed.

Yesterday, on a drizzly day, we decided to take a day trip to Myrtle Beach, which we knew was a beach resort on a strand, but didn’t know much else. It is grim. Grim, grim, grim. A hugely unpleasant, soulless place. It reminded me mostly of pictures of those Spanish resort towns that the British infested in the 1980s. A waterfront of ugly, tall, identikit concrete hotels, with no character whatsoever, it was even hard to see the ocean despite driving Ocean Boulevard. The overwhelming characteristic was of decay – these were hotels put up 15 or 20 years ago that have had no maintenance done since. One core characteristic was swimming pools full of faded and chipped waterslides that had once competed to be the most ludicrously over the top and tacky. They often go for a theme, like Polynesia or aquarium, but sometimes just for abstract art. So you sometimes see a lime green shark that a child will slide out of the mouth of, or a purple octopus that they’ll shoot  down the legs of. And sometimes you’ll see something like 30 year old bad Austrian municipal public art, all electric colours and lightning flashes and spheres. This being mid-December, everything was shut. I’ve had a penchant for off-season resort towns for a long time; but Myrtle Beach had none of the charm. There was no waterfront to play on. The shops and restaurants weren’t open even in the hope of getting the passing trade of rubberneckers like me. It was grim.

My eyes hurt just looking at the back of the box. Ow.

Trix Fruitalicious Swirls are definitely more Myrtle Beach than Charleston. They are unutterably nasty. They are deeply unpleasant - and the ugly swirls remind me of the garishly coloured and nasty pools and waterparks.

Trix is, itself,  a brand of cereal here in the US, with quite a lot of history, or at least cultural background: Beth has repeated the advertising tagline “Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids” to me many time. But I’ve not tried them yet, so can’t compare the Fruitalicious Swirls with their parent cereal. The most obvious comparison for me is with Froot Loops, which I wrote about a while back.

At first taste, Trix Fruitalicious Swirls win. Not just on the spelling of Fruit, either. The actual flavour is better. It’s marginally less artificial, and there’s an underlying cereal flavour which didn’t exist with Froot Loops. There’s something that’s actually holding the chemicals in place.

That said, they’re still not great. The fruit flavours are pretty foul, and fake. And the colours are scary – looking like a mix of diseased sloes and mushy peas and over-seasoned cheesy puffs. They leach out into the milk. After a while, the colours all merge to make a sort of pale puce, or washed out mauve. That is the more appealing side. Before the colours merge, the individual separate colours seep out in to the surrounding liquid so you see a blue halo of milk around the blue cereal. And if there’s one thing I know in life, it’s that milk shouldn’t be blue.

Would you want your children eating these? Really?

Whilst I was eating them, the swirls seemed just about tolerable. In the minutes afterwards, though, things got much, much worse. The residue that was left behind in my mouth, of chemicals and sugar, created flavours and sensations that I don’t want repeated. There were  smells that I’m pretty sure Beth doesn’t want to happen ever again; a lot of acid and chemical that couldn’t be got rid of,  even with a lot of brushing of teeth, and tongue, and mouth, and with mouthwash.

The nutritional value, too, appears to be nil. No more than an hour after breakfast, on our drive towards Myrtle Beach, I felt like I’d not eaten for weeks. I was famished. I’m pretty much convinced that the Trix Swirls had dissolved as sugar and chemicals, and had performed no useful function for my anatomy whatsoever.

There is no old world charm about Trix Fruitalicious Swirls. They are nasty, overwhelming, soul destroying, modern but without any modern appeal, and they leave a gruesome aftertaste: they are definitely the Myrtle Beach, not the Charleston, of breakfast cereals.

Blegh.

Breakfast of Champions

Athlete, pre-race

When I started thinking about writing this blog post, I was going to head it up “Breakfast of Champions” as a mocking sort of title, taking it from Kurt Vonnegut’s novel of that name. It turns out that the joke is on me.  To prove quite how much I’m coming to the US cereal scene blind, I was completely oblivious to the fact that “Breakfast of Champions” was the tagline of Wheaties, the cereal I was about to write about.

I was going to call it Breakfast of Champions because it had fuelled me to a moment of sporting triumph.

We’d arrived in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee – the home of Dolly Parton. It’s the Las Vegas of the hillbilly country music south, but without the drinking or gambling. It’s all bright lights, crappy amusement centres, bad hotels and Dollywood. Dollywood actually has some great rollercoasters, but the clientele could have lived up to every cliché. Few teeth, bad hats, plaid shirts and an excess of religion.

Along with all the tat, Pigeon Forge is also the gateway to the Great Smoky Mountain National Park – the setting is pretty stunning.  And it was where the first Smoky Mountain Santa Hustle was taking place. Beth, like the sadist she is, had entered me into a 5km race, along with Skip and Mark who’d joined us for Susan’s 40^th. I’d never run a serious, group race before. My natural pace is very, very slow. The omens were bad. Even worse when I knew I had to run in a Santa hat, and I was going to start wearing a Santa beard, the morning after a big blow-out 40^th birthday party – the county may be dry and alcohol free, but our cabin was not.

But, on the morning of the race I had a bowl of Wheaties Fuel. [Beth suggested this edit:] My gorgeous and brilliant wife (who I wrongly accused as a sadist in the paragraph above) had selected it for me especially for the raceday having a better understanding of what good American cereal is and a little sick of me going for just the most outrageously coloured boxes. Along with a number of other benefits, it definitely got me to the finish, and fast, under 27 minutes. 9^th in my age group. Now, 9^th might not be considered “champion” by some. But when your expectations are as low as mine were, it’s a massive achievement. 

Before I get on to the Wheaties, though, I’d better run through the other things that may have improved my performance:

-        I had a bit of a hangover, and perhaps the booze was still in the system

-        Running with Mark and Skip who paced and pushed me brilliantly

-        A peanut butter Clif bar, possibly the best tasting and textured energy bar I’ve ever had

-        Ice cold weather (substantially below freezing) meant you’d better run fast enough to stay warm

For the time being I’m giving credit to the Wheaties Fuel. These aren’t the traditional Wheaties. They’re one of the many subcategories of cereal that exist in the US.

One actual portion of breakfast

One great thing is that unlike a lot of other cereals, they aren’t trying to prove some kind of worthiness or low-calorieness. There’s much less of a lie about them. They know they’re full of calories and don’t really care. The crazy high sugar cereals of the US claim to have “120 calories” in a serving, Wheaties Fuel says bollocks to that and admits to 220 or so. It’s still the same sized portion – ¾ of a cup – but it’s high density, heavy and lovely, unlike the puffy things which are all air, inflated, meaning that ¾ of a cup weighs about 2 grams.  Laughably, of course, 120 calories isn’t enough for breakfast. It’s 1/10 of the amount of calories even the scrawniest dieting freak supermodel needs for a day. And breakfast is meant to be the biggest meal of the day. It’s a world of stupid out there.

Not Wheaties Fuel. They actually do what they’re meant to. They give you enough to get going.

And not only that, they’re delicious, too.  They’re by far the best cereal that I’ve had so far on this trip. There’s a heavy wheaty, cereally thing, in the flakes (apparently bran). And there’s something like puffed rice, but thinner and crunchier. The flavour has something malty in it, and some honey (Beth says that I sound like I’m describing a beer, which might be why I’m such a fan). It’s really, really nice. Not too sweet, but sweet enough to be edible.

Basically, Wheaties Fuel seem to be fantastic.

 I am told that there are sports champions on the Wheaties box, and that pretty much every kid in the US takes up sports not so that they’re obsessed with winning the 3 man coxless luge in the Olympics, but because the Olympic gold medal would give them a chance of a place on the box – but I don’t think I’ll be getting my face on a packet any time soon. 9^th place in the 40-45 age group in a field on 1000 runners is great, but not quite that great.

The next Wheaties box