Corn Flakes
When it comes to cereal, think outside of the box
Alright, today let’s make some Corn Flakes. This recipe is surprisingly very simple, only requires a few ingredients, and how did they taste? They’re great!
So, let’s get started.
INGREDIENTS:
1/2 cup or 90g cornmeal
1/2 cup water
salt
2 tsps granulated sugar
2 tsps vegetable oil
cooking spray
prepare the cornmeal base
This recipe is essentially a mixture of cornmeal and water, with a few extras in there.
First, let’s start with the cornmeal. I am using about ½ a cup or 90 grams of a course ground cornmeal here, but fine cornmeal should also work .
Next, we need to add about ½ cup of water to the cornmeal.
To add some base flavor, it also doesn’t hurt to add a few shakes of salt.
Now, if you want, you can optionally sweeten your Corn Flakes by adding a little sugar. Personally, I don’t like my Corn Flakes overly sweet, so I just added a smidge of sugar. You can (and probably should) use granulated sugar for this. Unfortunately, I had used up all my granulated sugar on the white chocolate recipe, so I am going to use a lil powdered sugar, roughly about 2 teaspoons.
Lastly, we need to add some oil - this will help to soften the Corn Flakes a little. I am adding about 2 teaspoons of vegetable oil.
Ok, mix this all up and we can move onto the next step.
Bake it and let science happen
Prepare a parchment lined baking tray. One little trick if you want your parchment paper to stick to the tray: use some cooking spray on the metal surface of the tray, and the parchment will stick!
Pour the corn mixture onto the prepared baking tray and spread it out as evenly as possible to ensure an even bake.
Once we have a nice even layer, place this into a 250 F or 120 C oven with the convection on (if you have it). The goal here is to bake under a low and even temperature.
We want to cook the cornmeal until the starch in the cornmeal gelatinizes. Once the corn starch within the cornmeal reaches 150 F or 65.5 C, it will begin to rapidly swell with the water we added, then explode and trap the water into a gel matrix. This is the process that happens when making bread, or when oatmeal thickens. After gelatnization occurs, we want to drive off any excess water by drying out the Corn Flakes until they become cereal-like.
Basically, all this cool stuff will happen while leaving the corn mixture in the oven for one hour. Once it’s done, carefully pull out the mixture and let it cool down to room temperature.
turn it into cereal
After it cools down, we are almost there! We now have our Corn Flake base, and all we gotta do to turn this into cereal is just break it up by hand and collect the flakes in a bowl. Try to get some even and uniform pieces.
When breaking these up, you may notice that the flakes are going to be a little jagged, and not have the same beautiful shape that you get with flakes out of the box - but that’s OK. Kellogg’s have specialized machines for doing this, so for a home made effort, we have to expect them to look a little different. On the plus side, anyone who gets to eat these flakes will immediately recongnize how cool you are for being able to make your own Corn Flakes!
This recipe made a small batch of the stuff, as I just have a small oven I use for filming. If you can use a full-size tray in your oven, you could easily double this recipe, and I 100% recommend doing this.
Now, how did it taste? Well, it was really good actually! I don’t normally like Corn Flakes all that much, they always just tasted kind of light and like I needed a million of them to fill me up. These are a little more hearty, and one bowl of them is very satisfying.
take it further
But what about Frosted Flakes?
Well, you could use the same tactic I tried in the cinnamon toast crunch, where you make a solution of sugar and water and spray that onto the cereal. Then you could toss them in some powdered sugar, and bam you will get some Frosted Flakes. However, I do think they taste pretty darned good on their own!
Condensed Recipe:
Combine cornmeal, water, salt, sugar and oil
Spread mixture evenly on parhment-lined baking tray
Bake for one hour and allow to cool
Break it up into flakes
Collect into a bowl
Links:
Mixing Bowls: https://amzn.to/3yZbEjA
Oven/Dehydrator: https://amzn.to/3wEOMEp
Cuisinart Burner: https://amzn.to/3xLyRFC
Kitchen Scales: https://amzn.to/3BWroGs
Baking Tray: https://amzn.to/3BRfPQJ
Parchment Paper: https://amzn.to/3ibvUsD
Mason Jar: https://amzn.to/2UTxwyF
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