My Top 10 Cereals for National Cereal Day

How does a cereal aficionado celebrate the greatest day in the cold breakfast calendar year? It’s a question I’ve been mulling over for several days. From debating eating nothing but cereal all day to creating a combination of all my favorite cereals, I’ve brainstormed more ways to mark this day of days than cereals in a Super Walmart. In the end though, it seems I’ve run out of time, and now that National Cereal Day 2012 is upon us, I remain blocked in my efforts to celebrate in a truly slam-bang way.

But isn’t that the point. Because, when you love something and its a part of your life everyday, isn’t every day in and of itself a National Cereal Day?

I argue it is, and as I sat googeling ”cereal day” late last night, I ran across a former column of mine I wrote while an editor for my old college paper, the Utah Statesman. In 2010 I ranked my “Top 10 Cereals of all Time,” and looking back on it now, I can see some changes are in order. So, in honor of the always evolving Cereal Master List, I present to you my current Top 10 Cereals for National Cereal Day.

1) Waffle Crisp: Hard to believe, but I discovered this bedrock of artificial flavor and addicting crunch soon after writing my Top 10 List back in 2010. While Waffle Crisp is tough to find, it’s amazing maple sweetness is unmatched, while it’s thick, crunchy pieces provide both the glazed mouthfeel of syrup, and the lickable quality of a sugar coating. A toasted nature forged from partially hydrogenated oil gives it no redeemable nutrition, but makes it oh so yummy. Just in case the cerealpocolypse is to happen with its discontinuation, I have a special “reserve box” I intend never to open.

2) Frosted Mini Wheats Little Bites Chocolate: An amazing specimen of nutrition and taste, the crunchy cocoa wheat bites hit you with a vanilla glaze over crunchy chocolate mini chips, proving excellent with both milk and plain. A respectable amount of giver and protein and clean ingredient list make them totally respectable for even party-pooping naturalists.

3) Froot Loops: I don’t know what it is about Froot Loops, but I can’t get enough. I’ve always just been drawn to sucking the very artificially laced berry flavors of each loop until they dissolve in my mouth, but there’s just something about a Talking Bird which makes me go loopy for Red #40 in all it’s processed glory.

4) French Toast Crunch: Need I say more after the week that was? I think not.

5) Honey Nut Cheerios: Classic. Iconic. The taste of honey, oats, and almonds is something that appeals to both the four-year old squirming around at church and the 44-year old who’s skipping the comfort of a morning donut so he can lower his cholesterol. Even in a cereal world of nw products that hit shelves by the week, this remains one of my favorites.

6) Cinnamon Toast Crunch: It’s not French Toast Crunch, but the American standby’s taste of butter and brown sugar are a fine substitute. Per piece, I don’t know if there’s a more enjoyable cereal than French Toast Crunch, which I prefer to eat like candy. Of course, if you want to just stuff a bunch in your face, that’s perfectly acceptable too.

7) Cap’n Crunch Crunchberries: Cap’n Crunch is fine if you ask me, but it’s absolutely magnificent when given the benefit of the cloying sweet taste of puffed berries (with ketchip, eh, not so much). I’ve always felt that coconut oil adds a certain exotic nature to Cap’n Crunch, and will always come back to the enduring Crunch Berry variety even though I might find other, newer attempts (ahem, chocolate) to absolutely suck.

8) Kashi GoLean Crisp Toasted Berry Crumble: Like granola, only better. The biggest downside in the fiber content. You know that whole bit about adding fiber slowly to your diet? Yea, good luck if you put a box of this in front of me!

9) Golden Grahams: The intensity of the honey graham flavor far surpasses any other cereal, while the highly underrated ability to the pieces to take on milk makes this one of the few cereals I will pour the dairy for. I wonder though, why no cartoon spokesman?

10) Cocoa Puffs: I went back and forth with Fruity Pebbles on this last spot for quite some time. And Lucky Charms. And Cookie Crisp. Oh hell, the tenth spot is like a revolving door of whatever cereal I’ve eaten recently and reminds me of what I’ve been missing. Right now, that cereal is Cocoa Puffs. No, it might not be real chocolate, but in terms of cocoa flavor, you can’t beat it. Clearly, this is what inspired me to buy that “I’m Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!” t-shirt I saw at Walmart a while back.

Alright. Let the good spirited debate begin. Your Top 10?

Rethinking French Toast Crunch

A week after what I had, at the time, deemed an “existential” crisis in my life as a cereal eater, I can report that my initial impressions of French Toast Crunch were subject to too high of expectations. These expectations of initial tasting would have left me feeling disappointed no matter how good the cereal ended up being, and must accordingly be revised.  Having now eaten the cereal multiple times as a snack and with milk — and, once more, eaten it without the anticipation of years of wanting — I can post the final, definitive word on French Toast Crunch.

French Toast Crunch is a great cereal. It is, I’m certain, in my Top 10. What I mistook originally for a weak maple syrup flavor is much more apparent and pronounced (although still light in flavor) when you’re not being a cereal narcissist and eating pieces one at a time, and as a snacking cereal I’ve come to find it balances textural components of glaze, pop, and crunch perfectly. I’m ashamed to admit my newfound appreciation for its snacking compatibility  nearly led me to finish my entire box without even trying it with milk, although I’m glad I did finally give into the moo of the bovine.

As many of you know, I don’t prefer my cereal with milk, but even I, a longtime hand-to-box-to-face eater, enjoyed the end-milk from French Toast Crunch. That’s not to say French Toast Crunch is a better cereal in milk than eaten straight from the box (I argue it isn’t, as it fails to take on any added richness, and loses a degree of crunch), but rather to report that the beige, maple-syrup tasting end milk left behind by French Toast Crunch far exceeded by usual ability to slurp the remnants of my bowl. Quite honestly, this is the kind of end-milk which would have made me more receptive to dairy in general as a youth, considering boosting French Toast Crunch’s utility as a nutritional powerhouse.

While I still will not rank French Toast Crunch as the greatest cereal ever (I stand by my claim that Waffle Crisp is clearly superior) I do recommend making it a stock-up item should you ever find yourself above the border. And for once, I find myself considerably jealous of Canada.

French Toast Crunch

• Price: N/A
• Ranking: 9/10
• Chances I’d Buy Acquire Again: 100%
• Chances I’d move to Canada for: +/- 45%

French Toast Crunch: The Review

When I was a freshman in college I had to take a philosophy class called ‘The Classical Mind’. It was horribly boring and was taught by a man who looked like he should be teaching at Harvard circa 1853, but looking back on it now, it was honestly one of the most interesting classes I’ve ever taken in my life. In any case, one of the things Professor Krause (pronounced KrowSE) had us read was Plato’s The Republic. Aside from instilling me with a belief in the virtues of Republicanism over all over forms of government (including democracy), The Republic introduced me to the Theory of Forms. Asserting that material objects we perceive in this world are but incomplete shadows of the complete and untold awesomeness of abstract Substances in a higher realm, the theory comes with the caveat that we can never really know the innate greatness of these Substances.

To the American cereal eater, French Toast Crunch is a lot like the Form of perfect cereal. No longer available on shelves in America, it exists more as a conception of half-recalled memories hinting at an almost metaphysical tasting experience from our youths, an experience which we acknowledge to exist separately in a state above us. That state is Canada, and aside from hosting summer football with 12 guys and three downs, it also hosts my favorite blog reader. Recently, she sent me a box, and like Chewbacca’s life debt to Han Solo, I am forever indebted to her because of her noble actions.

I bring this all up because what you are about to see pushes the bounds of metaphysics, and threatens the very philosophical underpinnings which keep us filling our morning bowls here in the states. And please note: the following photos were not taken in the 1990s. They were not taken in some forest in an unidentified Canadian location. They are in fact fresh and the late February sun, and situated in God’s own US of freaking A. Yes, my fellow American cereal eaters, I bring you the long-awaited review of French Toast Crunch.

Receiving a box of French Toast Crunch from that foreign and exotic land of toothless hockey players and red-coated police people presented an unexpected conundrum. Like beholding a vintage Grand Admiral Thrawn action figure still in the case, I was at first seized by the notion of tearing into my box of French Toast Crunch with all the fury of a sabertooth tiger. But the thought of discovering that the allure of French Toast Crunch — or, to borrow from Plato, the Form of Kids Cereal itself — could never live up to the actual pieces of maple flavored goodness…well, that gave me some pause. Suddenly, I just wanted to sit and admire the cereal, perhaps placing it on my bookcase next to my Utah State Diploma and my autographed Doug Flutie football card. Hey, did you know Doug Flutie’s played in Canada but was born in Marland? Dum dum dum…

I decided against it just admiring my box though. For better or for worse, I needed to know. I, a cereal eater aficionado, needed to know if the cereal we Yanks have always proclaimed to be the best ever is truly the best ever, or if we’ve sold ourselves to the prosaic nostalgia of time, imagining something that either never was, or can never be quite as we think it was. And so, I opened the box.

The initial flavor fails to deliver. The smell is not as intense as I’d expected (granted, I had high expectations), displaying a light, one might guess Grade A Light Amber synthetic quality to it. A faint aroma of glazed corn flour, not dissimilar to corn pops, rises from the mixture, which displays puffed pieces of truly golden toast pieces. It does not resemble the latter evolution of French Toast Crunch in America which I seem to recall.

That version was similar to Cinnamon Toast Crunch in that it was wheat and rice flour based. The Canadian version, or the “true” French Toast Crunch as I’ve been told, is made exclusively of corn derived products. The taste, as well as the glaze, resembles Corn Pops, and likewise, the puffed nature of the cereal allows for a very respectable serving size if you’re going by density. And I always do.

I am scientific and methodical in my initial forays. With no milk in the house and a preference to eat most sugary cereals (including CTC) plain, I alternate between sampling one piece at a time and chucking six or seven into my mouth. The glaze has a slight cinnamon flavor and a pleasant mouthfeel that doesn’t strike me as cheap as corn pops. It’s not as sweet as I imagined, but crunches more than I could have anticipated. There’s a certain “shred your mouth” crunch effect that reverberates in your skull, and I say that in a good way. The edges are sweeter than the interior, and while slight black specs give me pause for the cereal cause, I don’t notice any increased of flavor. The maple is there, but it’s light. Complex to a point, I nevertheless can’t deem it as any more authentic than Waffle Crisp or Eggo.

And that’s when it hits you. The moment when the novelty of that Grand Admiral Thrawn action figure dissipates. The realization that the book series you’ve been reading is about to end in a whimper and not a bang (oh God, please don’t let me experience that in two weeks). The inevitable writing on the wall that while good, the ideal is only the ideal when it is still just that, a freaking, you-can’t-have-me ideal. And when the ball drops, and you’re left with something good and bordering on great but truly not outstanding?

That’s when you realize you’re glad you finally know. Because French Toast Crunch is a good cereal, but so far, at least, it’s not the best cereal I’ve ever had. It’s better than Corn Pops. It’s different, and in some ways, superior to Cinnamon Toast Crunch. But it’s not Waffle Crisp. And hell yes I’ll say it, it’s not even close.

But I’m O.K. with that, and in the interest of full disclosure, I’m reserving final judgement until later this week, when a test in milk will determine if the magical properties of lactose can increase the french toastification of French Toast Crunch. For now though, I’ll be brutally honest with you. This is a very good cereal, but it cannot, as it has done so for some many of us, affix in our collective conscious as sugar-loving Americans the merits of Kids Cereal Form. It cannot be the 11 out of 10 on the scale of 10; the mythical memory of every nine-year old gathered on his or her couch with bowl and spoon and watching One Saturday Morning. That ideal, that platonic Form of which being a kid was about, that still holds over us with a question mark. For the time being I will enjoy the spicy, crunchy flavor of French Toast Crunch, but more importantly, I’ll be stocking up on Waffle Crisp until kingdom come. Because now I know that what I’ve long-held as the absolute pinnacle of cereals — Waffle Crisp — really is the pinnacle of the cereal shadows we see in our wordly cave.

French Toast Crunch Found!

I often wonder how the stuff that gets into Big Lots makes it in there. With a strange assortment of Megablox lego knockoffs and a plethora of European cookies biscuits, my gut feeling is that its part of strange effort by a Dutch mob group to exert its influence over our children, but then again my conspiracy theories have been known to crash and burn.

Case in point, the amount of off-the-wall American treats that line the grocery shelves. From Paula Deen’s peanut line to potato chips from every backwater town in Appalachia, Big Lots doesn’t discriminate when it comes to bringing in, well, stuff.

Stuff makes me curious, especially when it reminds me of other, better stuff that was egregiously taken from store shelves without due process or proper explanation. I am of course speaking of French Toast Crunch. Consistently ranked as one of the top foods we will “never” see again, it was discontinued in the United States in 2006 and remains one of the only reasons I’d ever consider moving to Canada (the other being an attempt at a CFL career, but that’s another story.) I only vaguely recall eating the cereal, but to my knowledge it remains the only real experience I’ve ever had with French Toast anything, unless you count a sunburn I received at the age of 14 while I was napping on one of those boring river cruises through Paris.

I don’t bring all this up to just jog your memory for the sake of depressing our collective national conscience, but rather because I spotted this while in Big Lots:

That’s right. CRUNCHMANIA. Produced by Kelloggs and not General Mills, mind you, each individual, 50-gram pouch cost me a quarter. A self-proclaimed “good source of Calcium” and a whopping 4 (count ‘em, 4) vitamins, it promises Bite Sized French Toast Graham Sticks which are both naturally and artificially flavored. In other words: it’s a cereal disguised as a 230-calorie pack snack.

The taste is exactly how it’s described, and surprisingly reminiscent of what I can remember as French Toast Crunch. A strong graham flavored base mixes with a cinnamon sugar sweetness almost exactly like a Nabisco cinnamon graham cracker, but there’s also a buttery-taste that mixes with a slight maple flavor. I wouldn’t say it’s authentic, but it bridges a line somewhere between Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Waffle Crisp, and reminds me of the faux French Toast taste of my youth. In milk, the story isn’t so positive. Despite their hefty nature the thick, toast-shaped squares dissolve easily, and don’t take on any added flavor. Once more, they don’t leave a sweetly satisfying end-milk, and just come across as altogether “meh.”

Which speaks to the problem of these as cereal. Crunchmania pieces lack the essential lightness of cereal texture, and fail to give off the more aptly described “crisp” that comes with Cinnamon Toast Crunch.  Likewise, their size makes them awkward to eat in the bowl preparation method, and better support snacking from the bag.

French Toast Crunch Found? In flavor, I believe so. But an exact and even breakfast worthy substitute, not so much. While I’ve become addicted to snacking on Crunchmania and would buy them again, something tells me their existence was limited in production, and aren’t readily available.  Still, I’m keeping one pack unopened, and will report back further once a certain box the customs agency may or may not have intercepted reaches my place of residence.

Kelloggs’ Crunchmania

• Price: $.25 (Big Lots)
• Ranking: 7/10
• Chances I’d Buy Again: 60%

Eating Cereal with Butter (Milk Alternative, Day 4)

Welcome back to Alternative Cereal Mediums week. Man, you guys and gals aren’t much for the football commentary, are you? Bummer. Well, believe it or not I actually did not eat breakfast cereal today, although I more than think Wednesday night’s alternative medium experiment made up for that.

The internet has been going berserk about Paula Deen’s diabetes announcement last week, but it also got me to thinking about the Southern Queen’s favorite ingredient: butter. I never buttered anything growing up and aside from baking my family doesn’t use butter for much (we’re olive oil people), but even I can’t deny the appeal of its richness.

Richness, huh? It’s a word that I’ve long used to describe what lacks in any given cereal, and given the shelf-stability of the product I choose to make my number one carb of choice, it’s not hard to figure why. But if it’s richness cereal is lacking, and milk isn’t doing it for me to eat my cereal in, wouldn’t it just figure to pour some hot butter over my cereal?

Taking a bowl of Frosted Toast Crunch, I decided to test out the idea by melting half a tablespoon of butter in a nonstick skillet, and then adding my bowl of FTC to toast it up ANOTHER NOTCH. Yes, the pictures suck, but such is unavoidable during a mad kitchen experiment at midnight. Deal with it.

I gave the final product a few minutes to cool, but I was a little disappointed in the texture. Not hard and toasty and rich, but slightly burnt tasting and malleable, albeit with an addictive marshmallow treat flavor of sugar and butter. I was looking for something that would taste like French Toast Crunch but instead I got a weird hybrid of Frosted Flakes and Rice Rice Krispies treats. Definetly yummy, but probably not an every night treat, and after the first few bites of novel excess, it does get slightly boring.

Rating: 7/10

Frosted Toast Crunch is Not French Toast Crunch

Expectations. Like those once reserved for the budding young sports writer whose stories were to be gracing the pages of Sports Illustrated by now, the promise of something great often leads us and those around us to disappointment or disillusionment when those promises don’t exactly come to fruition. God knows Kriss Proctor and the Navy offense were supposed to cap off the 2011 season with more than “just” a win over Army, and goodness attests to the fact that Boise State’s “dream team” had a perfect run to a BCS game — or, dare I suggest, Title Game — had they just been able to meet expectations and make a damn field goal.

Frosted Toast Crunch is a cereal of great expectations. Nevermind that its brother in sweetness Cinnamon Toast has a cult following greater than many small religions, but its appeal to the memory of the bygone French Toast Crunch makes its recent appearance on shelves a must-try for any child of the 1990s. French Toast Crunch, for the more football inclined readers of the audience, is something like the ’72 Dolphins. It was perfect. Or at least as perfect as sweetened corn in crunchy form with vitamins and minerals could be. Yet, like those “perfect” Dolphins, the recreation of its overwhelming awesomeness has never quite been repeated. There have been close attempts, no doubt, but has anything truly matched it? The answer, my friends, is “no.” And so, in all its discontinued and timeless perfection, French Toast Crunch lives on in growing legend – the cereal, we say, that broke our hearts when it was discontinued on these American shores.

To be perfectly honest I can’t remember much about French Toast Crunch. Like watching highlights of the ’72 Dolphins that came well before my time, my ability to come to grasp with its perfection as a breakfast cereal is based on conjecture. That being said, I feel confident in proclaiming that the new Frosted Toast Crunch cereal is not French Toast Crunch. To use a football analogy (new readers…get used to it) it’s not even the 2007 Patriots or 2011 Packers. What it is is like so many NFL teams that go 12-4 or 11-5 during any given year. A good, but not quite great, cereal that leaves you sitting in front of your television after the Division Championship Game asking yourself what could have been.

Looking at Frosted Toast Crunch is like looking at Cinnamon Toast Crunch. The “Frosted” part isn’t so much what you’d see on Frosted Cheerios or Frosted Flakes (those being more of a glaze) but rather a liberally applied coating of sugar. As you can see from the pictures, the coating sticks to your fingers with even the slightest touch, making snack-baggage a dubious difficulty, especially should you attempt to snack on these on the job or near a computer.

The taste seems similar to Cinnamon Toast Crunch minus the cinnamon, which, despite the promise of cinnamon on the box, really should have been featured more prominently. Despite only nine grams of sugar per 30 oz. (as opposed to 10 grams in CTC) the sweetness seems greater, although I still find it a bit one-note. As for the vanilla flavor, I suppose it’s there, but I need prompting from the back-of-the-box description before noticing it. Not that one-note sugar and slight vanilla taste makes for a bad cereal. To be honest, the toasted wheat flour and rice base does offer more variety in texture and chew than, say, Frosted Flakes. But like an offense that gets away from a balanced running and passing attack, it can only take me so far. I miss the assertive cinnamon flavor and want something to richen the coating, but find both desires unmet, and settle for trying it with milk.

Interestingly enough, Frosted Toast Crunch is one of the few cereals I seem to enjoy more with milk than dry. Like Cinnamon Toast Crunch it takes on a pleasant level of sogginess while still retaining its sugary sheen, transferring an ideal sweetness to the milk that a long-standing lacto-phobe like myself can appreciate. What you’re left with is an end-milk that would be banned in most public school systems due to added sugar, as well as a dissolving crunch in the wheat and rice base.

Final Thoughts

Would I buy Frosted Toast crunch again? Eh, maybe. Overall, I still like Cinnamon Toast Crunch better, and find the taste of the cinnamon sugar to hold a hint of the butter flavor that once made French Toast Crunch so popular. And perhaps that undermines the very idea of Frosted Toast Crunch. Expecting a step forward to the return to French Toast Crust — the return, if you will, to the perfect season — I instead find something which is just good. I have had many good cereals though, and I’ve watched many good football teams. But excellent? No, not even in the same ballpark. Ultimately, Frosted Toast Crunch isn’t a failure because it’s not good. But it’s a failure because it can’t live up to something it promises — through indirect marketing or my own unrealistic expectations — and subjected to a sea of sugary milk and woulda, coulda, shouldas.

•  Price: $2.50 (on sale at Topps)
• Ranking:6/10
• Chances I’d Buy Again: 10%