Corn Flakes — Flavor Lab (2024)

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.

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.

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!

• 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

• 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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