Homemade Corn Flakes
One of this week’s DIY projects was making homemade corn flakes breakfast cereal. It was easy and tasty; I’ll definitely make these again. Read on for how to make your own and stop buying the stuff in a chemically treated box.
I started out with Mark Bittman’s recipe for breakfast cereal in The Food Matters Cookbook, but tweaked it a little by using local honey instead of the sugar in his recipe. I used finely ground corn meal from Oak Grove Plantation and Farmer-Ground Flour‘s half-white wheat flour. The only non-local ingredient was the oil.
Leda’s Corn Flakes
Makes approximately 4 servings
1/2 cup finely ground cornmeal, plus a little extra
1 1/2 cups flour (Bittman uses whole wheat)
1 1/2 tablespoons honey
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1. Preheat oven to 300F. Lightly dust two baking sheets with corn meal.
2. Put all the ingredients except the honey in a food processor and pulse to combine. Dissolve the honey in 1/4 cup water. Add the honey water to the other ingredients and let the machine run for a little while. Add additional water 1 teaspoon at a time until the dough holds together but isn’t sticky. Divide the dough into two balls.
3. Lightly flour a work surface and roll out the dough as thinly as possible, adding flour as needed to keep the dough from sticking. Bittman says “1/8 inch thick or even thinner.” Transfer the dough to one of the baking sheets. Roll out the second half of the dough and transfer to the other baking sheet.
4. Bake until crisp and lightly browned, about 30 minutes. Let the pans cool completely before crumbling the sheets of baked dough into flakes.
They look more like broken crackers than commercial corn flakes, but the flavor and crunch is excellent. The only thing I’ll do differently next time is roll them out even thinner in hopes of getting a lighter texture.
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Next you’ll be making your own phyllo dough!
I’m wondering how it would work to roll the dough out in a pasta machine, to get it really thin.
Yes, Bittman mentions the option of using a hand-crank pasta machine, and I think I’m going to try that next time.
Hi Leda, I’ve just made these. I used a pasta machine to roll the dough out quite thin. I only rolled it to setting #3, because it seemed thin enough, but I think next time I’d roll it out even thinner, maybe to #6 or #7 if possible. I used a shade more honey (Greek thyme honey). I just had a bowl of them with milk - very, very delicious and sooo crunchy. Since we’ve had to cut way back on our spending, we haven’t bought corn flakes since 2010. It’s so nice to be able to eat them again 🙂 thank you! I’ll probably blog about this soon too.
Any chance we can cut them evenly (just run a knife, not bothering to separate) before baking?
Should work
Wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar