Count Chocula Plush – $9.95

Are you looking for a way to reclaim your misspent youth? You need the Count Chocula Plush from the NeatoShop. This adorable little plush is almost as comforting as eating a bowl of chocolate-flavored corn cereal bits and marshmallows. Almost.

Franken Berry Plush and Boo Berry Plush also available.

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more cuddly Plush Toys.

Link

]]> http://www.neatorama.com/2011/09/05/count-chocula-plush/feed/ 0 http://www.neatorama.com/2011/05/26/if-boring-cereals-had-mascots/ http://www.neatorama.com/2011/05/26/if-boring-cereals-had-mascots/#comments Fri, 27 May 2011 02:19:06 +0000 Stacy http://www.neatorama.com/?p=46735

College Humor imagined what the cereal aisle at the grocery store might look like if the heart-healthy, full-of-fiber cereals had fun mascots like the sugary ones do. The Grape Nuts one is my favorite – I think it tastes like gravel.

Link via Flavorwire

A Vancouver ad agency called Dare came up with this creative stunt to unveil the new Honda Civic in Canada. The vague idea is that the Honda Civic is as fun as toy cars, but I’d just like to know what those giant cereal bits are made out of, myself.

Link via AdFreak

What do you get when you cross Cap’n Crunch with Captain Morgan? The baddest cereal mascot EVAR! (Bonus: Toucan Sam!) From deviantART user ninjaink – via Popped Culture

Steve D took an offhand comment from Twitter and ran with it, creating an actual box of Astronom O’s, “The Breakfast of People Who Stay Up All Night”. The oat cereal contains marshmallow moons and stars, and the box features Carl Sagan on the front and star facts on the back. He also made a single-serving size! Do you think General Mills might find this idea worth marketing? Link -via the Presurfer

What was your favorite sugar-coated cereal when you were a kid? Does it exist anymore? It may be featured in this roundup at Urlesque. You can recall when ice cream cones, donuts, milkshakes, candy, and of course, pop culture characters were honored in breakfast cereal. And you won’t need an insulin shot just for looking! Link -Thanks, Hillary!

(Image credit: Urkel For President by Flickr user JasonLiebig)

Americans eat nearly three billion boxes of cereal every year. And yet few of us know how Rice Krispies, Corn Pops, or any other cereal is made. Here’s a look at the science behind some of our favorite breakfast foods.

(Image credit: Flickr user Snugg LePup)

NATURAL-BORN POPPER

Popcorn for breakfast? It’s not the first thing most people think of eating in the morning, and it’s not marketed as a breakfast food. But popcorn does have many of the qualities that cereal manufacturers look for in a breakfast food; It’s light and airy, it’s crispy, and it crunches when you eat it. If you put some popcorn in a bowl and poured milk over it, it would probably stay crunchy at least as long as your favorite breakfast cereal does.

But what about foods that don’t pop naturally the way that popcorn does? Quite a bit of the technology used in the manufacture of breakfast cereals is employed specifically to make those foods “poppable” -to produce desirable, popcorn-like qualities in foods that don’t normally have them. Foods like whole-grain rice and wheat, for example. Or grains that have been milled into flour, then mixed with other ingredients to make dough that is then baked into individual pieces of cereal.

POPCORN 101

To understand how whole grains and dough end up as Puffed Wheat, Cheerios, and Kix, it helps to understand what makes popcorn pop in the first place.

(Image credit: Flickr user Jaymi Heimbuch)

* A kernel of popcorn consists of a hard shell that surrounds a dense, starchy center, and there’s a lot of moisture in the starch. When you place a bag of unpopped popcorn in the microwave oven, the microwave “cooks” the popcorn by heating the moisture in the starch. The starch softens and develops a consistency similar to gelatin as it cooks.

* When the moisture is heated to the boiling point, it converts into steam and begins to expand. Or at least it wants to: What makes popcorn different from most other grains is that its hard outer shell does not allow the steam to escape. Instead, the kernel of corn becomes like a tiny pressure cooker: The steam pressure builds up until the outer shell can no longer contain it, and it ruptures.

* If you’ve ever opened a bottle of champagne or shaken a bottle of soda, or squirted a dollop of shaving cream into your hand, it’s easy to understand what happens next: When the shell cracks, the pressure drops and the moisture in the starch instantly converts from a liquid state to a gaseous state, creating air bubbles in the cooked, gelatinous starch that causes it to froth up in a foamy mass, expanding it to 30 or 40 times its original size. The steam escapes, leaving behind the dried, crunchy, styrofoamy starch that we know as popcorn.

POP! GOES THE CEREAL

Wheat and rice don’t have external shells that trap steam the way corn does, so if you want to obtain popcornlike results with these grains, you have to provide the pressure cooker. When cereal companies want to make puffed wheat, puffed rice, or puffed dough, they do just that, using a process known as “gun puffing” developed by Quaker Oats researchers at the turn of the 20th century. Why is it called gun puffing? Because the process was perfected using an actual Army cannon -one that saw action in the Spanish American War- that was converted into a pressure cooker. (Corn kernels can also be gun puffed. That’s how Kellogg’s Corn Pops are made.)

(YouTube link)

Corn Pops, Puffed Wheat, and Puffed Rice

* Whole grains are steam cooked in a pressure cooker (or cannon) until the pressure builds to about 200 pounds per square inch (psi), or about 13.6 times the actual atmospheric pressure (at sea level).

* When the grains have been properly cooked, the pressure inside the pressure cooker is released all at once, just like when popcorn pops. There’s even a loud POP! when the pressure is released.

* The sudden drop in pressure causes the moisture in the grains to flash into steam, puffing up the grains just like popcorn.

* The puffed grains are baked dry, and in the case of puffed-wheat cereals like Kellogg’s Honey Smacks and Post Golden Crisp, lots of sweeteners are added to make them more appealing to kids.

“Extruded” Gun-Puffed Cereals Made From Dough

How do they make Kix, Trix, Cheerios, Alpha Bits, Cocoa Puffs, and other “extruded gun-puffed” cereals?

* Various combinations of corn, oat, wheat, and rice flours are mixed with sugar, water, coloring, flavoring, and other ingredients to make a sweet dough, which is fed into a machine called a foaming extruder.

* The extruder forms the dough into the desired shape just like you might have done if you played with Play-Doh when you were a kid: To create a star shape, you squeeze, or extrude, the dough through a star-shaped hole. If you want a round shape, you squeeze the dough through a round hole. If you’re making Cheerios, you punch a hole in the middle to get a donut shape, and if you’re making Alpha-Bits, you use letter-shaped holes.

* As the extruded dough emerges from the hole in the proper shape,  rotating blades cut it into individual cereal pieces.

* The freshly extruded dough pieces have too high a moisture content to be suitable for gun-puffing, so they are dried until their moisture content drops from as high as 24% down to a more desirable 9% to 12%. (Unpopped popcorn kernels, by comparison, have a moisture content of 13.5% to 14%.)

* The dried pieces are fed into a gun puffer. The puffed cereal is then toasted dry.

RICE KRISPIES

If you’ve ever watched cookies bake in an oven, you know that the dough puffs as it cooks. Rice Krispies are made the same way, in a process that’s known as “oven-puffing.”

* First, the rice is pressure cooked at a low 15-18 psi (vs. the 200 psi used in the gun-puffing process) with water, sugar, salt, flavoring, and other ingredients.

* The cooked rice is then dried to reduce the moisture content from 28% to 17%; then it is “bumped,” or fed through rollers to flatten the grains slightly and create small cracks in the rice, which will aid puffing.

* The cooked, bumped rice is dried a second time to bring the moisture content from 17% down to around 10%, which is ideal for oven-puffing. The grains are then fed into a rotating oven and baked at 550°-650°F for about 90 seconds to give them their distinctive puffy appearance and crunchy texture.

* So what causes the famous Snap! Crackle! Pop! sound? The walls of the puffed Rice Krispies kernels are so thin and brittle that many of them collapse when they come into contact with milk.

(YouTube link)

CORN FLAKES AND BRAN FLAKES

Looking into a bowl of Corn Flakes or Raisin Bran, it’s easy to imagine all those flakes started out as one single sheet of cereal that was crumbled into a thousand individual flakes. But that’s not how they’re made.

* It turns out that it’s much easier to make each flake separately. In the case of corn flakes, kernels of corn are processed to remove the hard outer shell and the germ, the part of the kernel that would have grown into a corn stalk if the kernel had been planted as a seed. What’s left after the shell and the germ are removed? Chunks of starch, each of which will become an individual corn flake.

* The chunks are cooked in a solution of water, sugar, salt, flavoring, and other ingredients until the hard, white starch has become soft, translucent, and a light golden brown in color.

* The cooked corn is fed into “de-lumping” equipment to break up any clumps; then it’s dried in a hot-air dryer and fed through giant rollers to flatten the chunks of corn into flakes.

* The flakes are toasted until they reach the proper golden color and have a moisture content of 1.5 to 3 percent.

* Bran flakes are made pretty much the same way, except that whole grains, not chunks, are used to make the flakes. Flaked cereals can also be made from rice or from dough.

___________________

The article above was reprinted with permission from the Bathroom Institute’s newest book, Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Now That’s Nifty has a 3 part series featuring 90 retro breakfast Cereals, from C-3PO’s and Nintendo System cereal to Nerds and Urkel O’s. Check it out, part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Breakfast cereals have been popular ever since Will Keith Kellogg invented Corn Flakes. Since then, cereal has taken many forms, and become popular in many countries.

When I was little, I used to get a small mixing bowl and fill it with several kinds of cereal. I would then sit on the heater vent in the living room and feast away.

I still eat cereal sometimes before bed. Is there anything more delicious than a bowl of Cinnamon Life? Don’t bother answering, the answer is “no, there is not.”

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by ninigoat.

The food blog Eating the Road presents this handy flow chart that you can use whilst shopping for cereal. Which cereal should you buy? The chart allows you to factor in issues such as current state of intoxication, nationality, ChurckNorrishood, and cultural pretentiousness. Larger image at the link.

Link via Radley Balko

The breakfast aisle at the grocery is full of cereals with silly names, but some from the past are real winners. In today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss, you are challenged to distinguish real cereal names from some that were just made up for the quiz. I am almost ashamed to admit I scored 90% on this quiz! Link

Here’s proof that people will sue just for about anything: a plaintiff named Janine Sugawara sued the makers of Cap’N Crunch Crunch Berries cereal because she found out that the "crunchberries" are not really berries!

In another proof that the judicial system works,  the judge dismissed her complaint:

On May 21, a judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California dismissed a complaint filed by a woman who said she had purchased “Cap’n Crunch with Crunchberries” because she believed “crunchberries” were real fruit. The plaintiff, Janine Sugawara, alleged that she had only recently learned to her dismay that said “berries” were in fact simply brightly-colored cereal balls, and that although the product did contain some strawberry fruit concentrate, it was not otherwise redeemed by fruit. She sued, on behalf of herself and all similarly situated consumers who also apparently believed that there are fields somewhere in our land thronged by crunchberry bushes.

Cap’n According to the complaint, Sugawara and other consumers were misled not only by the use of the word “berries” in the name, but also by the front of the box, which features the product’s namesake, Cap’n Crunch, aggressively “thrusting a spoonful of ‘Crunchberries’ at the prospective buyer.” Plaintiff claimed that this message was reinforced by other marketing representing the product as a “combination of Crunch biscuits and colorful red, purple, teal and green berries.” Yet in actuality, the product contained “no berries of any kind.” Plaintiff brought claims for fraud, breach of warranty, and our notorious and ever-popular California Unfair Competition Law and Consumer Legal Remedies Act.

Link – via kevinunderhill

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by dradell.

Link via SeriousEats

Link via Slashfood via lemondrop.