Corn Pop Recipes

August 6, 2008 12:12 PM

I have a bag of Corn Pops that has gotten stale. Is there anything I can do with it to salvage the food? Looking for recipes or ways to keep me from tossing it (or most likely eating stale cereal till it is finished)
posted by sandmanwv to Food & Drink (8 answers total)

Stale = moisture.
Pour them onto a baking sheet and put them in your oven at about 200F for 10 min to crisp them back up.

Or, make corn pop treats like you would rice krispies treats.
posted by rmless at 12:18 PM on August 6, 2008

just for fun why not put them in a bag, crush them up, and then make a porridge out of the resulting mixture.
posted by ian1977 at 12:21 PM on August 6, 2008

If they've just absorbed some moisture, crisping them up in the oven as rmless suggests will work. If the small amount of fat in them has gone a little rancid, though, toasting them will just give you hot, rancid Corn Pops, and the best thing to do is pitch them.
posted by jocelmeow at 12:43 PM on August 6, 2008

Maybe you could crush them up and use them instead of bread crumbs for breading a meat? I've never actually done this, but I imagine it could be interesting.
posted by Meagan at 12:50 PM on August 6, 2008

Feed it to birds or squirrels. Or try the many suggestions available, inter alia, here.

There must be some kind of Hints from Heloise, Battle Creek edition.
posted by Clyde Mnestra at 1:25 PM on August 6, 2008

Thirding rmless, I learned from Alton Brown that "fresh" food means that the moisture is in the right place. For example, in freshly fried chicken the moisture is held in the chicken, making it juicy, and the moisture has been driven out of the breading, making it crispy. After a night in the fridge the moisture between the chicken and breading equalizes, leaving you with something not nearly as good.

It's a little more complex for a single component starch like bread or cereal, but the principle is the same. There are microscopic starch granules in your cereal that have absorbed water from the air, making them lose their crunch. The answer is to drive the water out with a little heat. In my household we often accumulate a half dozen bags nearly empty bags of corn chips, I pop them into a 425F oven for a few minutes and they crisp right back up.
posted by TungstenChef at 1:55 PM on August 6, 2008

I wonder if you could grind them up and use them to make a crust for a cheesecake or pie... sort of like a graham cracker crust, but with a more distinctive flavor?
posted by arianell at 4:46 PM on August 6, 2008

According to Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, "staling will occur even if there is no net loss of moisture from the cereal. Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Boussingault showed in 1852 that staling can be reversed by reheating bread to 140°F/60°C: the temperature, we know now, at which starch gelates. Staling is now understood to be a manifestation of starch retrogradation, the recrystallization, water migration out of the granules, and hardening that take place when cooked starch is then cooled. ... Reheating reverses staling: as long as much of the water released by the starch granules remains in the surrounding gluten--that is, as long as the loaf isn't too old, or has been wrapped and refrigerated--staling can be reversed by heating as described above. Once more the crystalline regions are disrupted, water molecules move in between the starch molecules, and the granules and amylose gels become tender again."
posted by halogen at 4:49 PM on August 6, 2008 [1 favorite]