vs.
vs.
Mom
(recipe below)
___________________________
I feel a twinge of guilt every time I buy packaged Chex Mix, because the homemade kind a) costs less, b) has minimal junk ingredients, and c) tastes soooooo much better!
There were two recipes in the Yellow Box for versions of Chex Mix that are so old, it wasn't even called Chex Mix yet! My guess is they're from no later than the 1970s, since I was born in '73 and remember only ever calling Chex Mix "Chex Mix." In all my Chex Mix tasting experience, I have consistently thought my mom's version is the best, but I was curious to give these old recipes a try.
The thing is, I didn't intend to make all three recipes at once; but had flies been on the kitchen wall that day, they would have witnessed nothing short of a comedy of errors that left me with enough Chex Mix to satisfy my kid's entire eighth grade class. (If you want to spare yourself the gory details, I won't blame you for skipping on down to the recipes at the end.)
I started off with ambitious gusto, thinking I would put together the recipe called "Mix" in about 15 minutes, and then spend a couple of hours cleaning house while the mix roasted in the oven. However, the problem - let's call it Problem No. 1 - with
both recipes is that they call for merely "1" of each of the main ingredients. I assume this was a non-issue a few decades ago, but have you seen the cereal aisle lately? Cheerios come in at least three sizes now. And I'm pretty sure they weren't dumping an entire pretzel "pounder" bag into the pan back then. I suspect a lot (or perhaps the majority) of people would just wing it and use their best guess, but my goal here is to produce the recipes as they were originally written (with very occasional exceptions), and then tweak them later, if needed.
Besides not knowing the original package sizes, I had no clue what the heck "Ralston Squares" were. A search of the internet revealed no such term; the best I came up with was a list of breakfast products made by the old Ralston food company, which included lots of square-shaped cereals. I suppose this would be Problem No. 2, which I resolved, at least temporarily, by using Corn Chex, since Rice and Wheat Chex were already listed. However, after more thought and research, I now wonder if Ralston Squares might refer to bite-sized shredded wheat (the un-frosted kind). I just don't know. And neither, apparently, does the internet.
So, with the Corn Chex subbing in for Ralston Squares, I was back to Problem No. 1: what size were the packages at the time these recipes were written? My baking project became a research project as I hit the internet once again in search of the answers.
I actually love a good research project, to the point that I can waste hours trying to find the information I need. In this case, I spent over an hour online scanning through images of old cereal boxes, pretzel packages, and vintage cans of mixed nuts. Happily,
Mr. Breakfast's website saved the day with his "Cereal Project" featuring just about every type of Chex cereal box ever produced. I remembered that when I was little, Corn, Rice, and Wheat Chex all came in the same size boxes, so I determined that the packages of that era contained 12, 12, and 15 oz., respectively. As for Cheerios, which has been packaged in varying amounts over the years, I decided to go with 13 oz. and call it close enough.
The pretzels had me stumped, though, until I came across someone's nostalgic blog post about the 1970s and how much she missed Mr. Salty Pretzels. Of course! I totally remember Mr. Salty! How could I have forgotten those deliciously salty thin twists? What happened to Mr. Salty, anyway? Maybe that's why I'm not a huge fan of pretzels anymore. They're just not the same as Mr. Salty. In any case, I was then able to find an image of an old Mr. Salty box: 10 oz.
Frankly, by the time I got to looking for vintage cans of deluxe mixed nuts, the project was becoming tiresome, and I had already spent waaaaaay more time on it than I'd intended. 2 cups of nuts sounded good to me.
Having settled on the number of ounces I wanted to use for each cereal, I suddenly recognized Problem No. 3: I don't have a food scale. Instead, I had to estimate the amount of cereal I would need out of each box according to its total weight. Wheat Chex seemed easy enough; the image of the old box showed 15 oz. and the current box was 14 oz., so I figured using the whole box would be sufficiently close to the original amount called for.
Oh, yeah. Insert Problem No. 4 here: we moved into this great house a couple of months ago, with all top-of-the-line appliances, except that the double wall oven is an older model and won't accommodate a pan wider than 17 inches, so my cookie sheet doesn't fit, and I don't own a roasting pan or anything that would be deep enough to hold a lot of mix. Uninterested in shopping for new bakeware at the moment, I drove instead to my parents' house, a mile down the road, to borrow one of their cookie sheets and a couple of different sized roasting pans.
Back home again, I dumped the entire package of Wheat Chex into the largest roasting pan. Then it occurred to me that, for future reference, I should measure out the cereal by cups, so I tranferred the cereal from the pan into my biggest measuring cup, determined that the 14-oz. box of Wheat Chex equaled approximately 5 cups, and poured it back into the pan.
By this point, it had been more than two hours since I'd "started" making the recipe, and I had only one ingredient in the pan. I glanced at my notes showing that the old Corn Chex box was 12 oz. I looked at the 14-oz. package on my kitchen counter. Enter Problem No. 5: considering the amount of Wheat Chex already in the pan, and even leaving out approximately 2 oz. of Corn Chex, it was going to be way, way too much cereal. After all that time I'd spent determining the proper package sizes, my patience and tenacity crumbled like cereal under a pounding fist. My plan to recreate the exact proportions of the original recipe was simply not going to work. With a sigh of futility, I decided to wing it. I measured and added 8 cups of Corn Chex, 8 cups of Rice Chex, 8 cups of Cheerios, and...
uh-oh.
Problem No. 6: the pan was full, with no room left for pretzels and nuts, much less for stirring it all up with the seasonings.
Well, crap. This was the biggest pan I had. I wasn't about to go buy an even bigger one. Now I was impatient
and starting to panic. I just wanted to get the damned pretzels and nuts mixed in with the cereal. I dug around in the cabinets, pulled out our enormous blue plastic popcorn bowl, and began pouring the mixture into it, but the bowl wasn't even close to big enough. I needed something even bigger. I went to the pantry and found a medium-sized paper grocery bag, opened it up, and began pouring the cereal from the bowl into the bag, but
that wasn't big enough, either. I went back to the pantry and pulled out a full-sized paper grocery bag, dumped all the cereal in there along with 8 cups of pretzels, and shook it all up together.
There. I peered into the bulging grocery bag at what was now
thirty-seven cups of mix.
Now, for Problem No. 7: what to do about the nuts?
Thinking it would save a little money, I had gone to the bulk section of Whole Foods for the nuts, and ended up with a total of 3 cups that cost around $12 - not a bad deal, I thought. But 3 cups of nuts looked pretty dinky sitting next to a grocery bag full of cereal and pretzels. The ratio would be way off, and I didn't want to go back to the store. Instead, I decided to divide the mix into each of the three pans I'd borrowed from my parents, and ended up with:
8 cups in the small pan, with no nuts;
12 cups in the medium pan, adding 1 cup of nuts; and
the remaining 17 cups in the large pan, with 2 cups of nuts.
I stood there, pondering 40 cups of Chex Mix and feeling very, very certain that, despite all my time and effort, this was
not the actual amount called for in the original recipe. It also - perhaps belatedly - occurred to me that the exact proportions of the cereals, pretzels, and nuts are not the essential thing, but rather the amount of seasoning used, which presented me with Problem No. 8: even though the "Mix" recipe called for a whopping three sticks of butter, there was no way that it would be sufficient to coat everything I had prepared.
My brain's creaky wheels started turning... three pans... three recipes....
It was clearly a sign that I should conduct a Chex Mix recipe taste-off. I had all the ingredients for the seasonings, after all. I'd made it this far - might as well go for it.
A-a-a-a-a-and Problem No. 9 reared its ugly head (don't worry - this is the last one): I had three recipes that specified three different temperature settings, but only two ovens. I refused to let this daunt me. I baked the "Mix" and my mom's recipes at 225° and the "Appetizers" at 300° (also, I ignored the Appetizers suggestion and did not cover any of them), and they all turned out fine.
Six sticks of butter, a plethora of seasonings, and three hours later (I baked my mom's mix an extra hour), I had an astounding amount of aromatic deliciousness sitting on my kitchen counter:
After spending
so much time and overcoming
so many obstacles, I expected a much more dramatic outcome. Surely one of the recipes would blow the other two out of the water.
Not so much.
Although I can detect a difference among the three recipes, I really don't have a preference. They're all good, in my opinion. If I
had to choose, though, I would still have to say that my mom wins. With at least quadruple the Worcestershire sauce than the other two, Mom's recipe has the stongest and most distinctive flavor. However, the Cheerios do tend to sink to the bottom and soak up the sauce, resulting in a lot more shriveled brown o's than the other two batches - but some people like that. Either way, the "Mix" and "Appetizers" are plenty tasty as well, and I munched away contentedly on all three.
Doing the math, I determined that, for all three batches, the butter-to-cereal ratio was between 4-6 tablespoons of butter for every 4 cups of cereal/pretzels/nuts.
Here's my math, in case you're interested:
I also did the math on the Worcestershire-butter ratios, if anybody cares:
But that's kind of beside the point.
In the end, the moral of this story is:
There are many paths to delicious Chex Mix.
Simply combine whatever cereals, pretzels, snack crackers, nuts, etc., that please you, and use one stick of butter (plus seasonings) for every 6-8 cups of dry ingredients.
THE END.
______________________________
Please note: if you skipped the narrative portion of this blog entry, the first two recipes call for an indeterminate amount of cereals, pretzels, and nuts according to modern-day packaging. I recommend using 6-8 cups of dry ingredients per stick of butter or margarine called for in the recipe.
______________________________
-Mix-
1 Cheerios
1 Ralston Squares [
possibly Corn Chex or un-frosted mini-wheats]
1 Thin Pretzels
1 Wheat Chex
1 Rice Checks
1 can nuts
3/4 lb. oleo (3 sticks)
2 tbsp Worcestershire
1 tbsp season salt
1 tbsp garlic salt
In roaster - no lid
200° - 2 hrs
Stir occasionally
______________________________
Appetizers
(from Betty Baughman)
1 pkg Cheerios
1 pkg pretzels (thin)
1/2 lb. oleo or butter
1 tbsp celery salt
1 pkg Rice Chex
1-1/2 lbs. mixed nuts
1-1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
2 tsp garlic salt
Bake in large pan (I use roaster & cover it) 300° degrees for 2 hrs.
Stir occasionally to help butter work in evenly.
[
there are a few additional notes on this recipe that look like possible variations, but they aren't disctinct enough to incline me to retype them here]
________________________________
Chex Mix
(from my mom)
Combine:
1 stick melted butter
1/2 tsp onion salt
1/2 tsp garlic salt
1 tsp seasoning salt
3 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
Combine:
2 cups Crispix
2 cups Wheat Chex
1 cup Cheerios
1 cup pretzels
1 cup mixed nuts
Pour butter/seasoning mixture over cereals and mix well.
Place in large pan and bake @ 225°; stir every 15 minutes for 1 hour.
Turn out onto paper towels and let cool.
_________________________________
