I am a very adventurous eater. I also like to cook. I have never in my 44+ years of living ever heard of anyone actually making their own Chex mix. I mean this is crappy filler stuff you buy at the store for occasions like, oh the super bowl or the Stanley Cup!
?!
242,000 hits when googling Chex Mix recipe, my friend!
Seriously, gotta try it. It puts the packaged stuff to shame. Serious, serious shame. It’s the Chex Mix you eat 'cause it’s so so good you can’t stop, not the salted cardboard you eat so you can drink more beer and not throw up.
This is the shizzle, the original recipe, over 50 years old. This is for the namby-pamby renovators and their silly bagel chips. This is the “California recipe”. (It’s got the fruits and nuts.)
So typical of anything California. In fact, I heard this as a definition of the Granola state: “Whatever ain’t fruits or nuts is flakes.” 
All those are different from the one on the Chex box for the last few years. I’ve got older ones in cook books that show changes over the years. The latest is the tastiest. The bagged stuff on the shelf is one of these food items that taste nothing like the actual thing.
3 cups of wheat chex
3 cups of rice chex
3 cups of corn chex
6 tablespoons butter
2 tablespoons worcestershire
1 & 1/2 teaspoons seasoned salt
3/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
1 cup mixed nuts
Put everything except the nuts and chex into a microwaveable bowl and heat until the butter just melts. Put the chex cereal into a glass bowl and pour the seasoning mixture over it, stir to coat all the chex cereal.
Microwave 2 minutes, stir, microwve 2 minutes, stir, microwave 2 minutes, and dump it into a container to cool. Add the nuts. Add what ever other chips you like, traditionaly it’s pretzels.
My variation is to add the nuts to the butter when melting and pour them onto the chex mix coated in the seasoning also. They taste better. My favorite add in is orange cransrasins. I never add pretzels. I do add other flavoured crackers and chips sometimes.
My recipe:
half a box of “Crispy Hexagons*” (generic Crispix)
half a jar of pretzels
enough straight (or Cristmas shaped) pretzels to look good
enough generic cheerios to look good
melt:
3 tablespoons margerine
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
(if I had onion powerd I’d add /14 teaspoon of that as well)
2 teaspoons lemon juice
4 teaspooons Worchesteshire sauce
pour over dry ingrediants, strirring so they get coated well
sprinkle seasoned salt and cajun seasoning
cook 45 minutes at 250 F stirring every 15 min ( I sprinkle extra season salt / seasoning before each stir)
Brian
- The smaller box size. don’t have one at home - maybe 20 oz
The gamer in me likes the name
Harmonious Discord is right; that’s the classic recipe (except I think I’ve seen it with pretzels, sometimes). But I like it better oven-baked–it’s the traditionalist in me.
The first two recipes referenced by WhyNot don’t have all three kinds of Chex–what is up with that? That’s just crazy talk. You have to have all three Chex varieties, or it’s just not right. I just couldn’t bring myself to even look at the third recipe. Fruits & nuts, indeed. :dubious:
Gardetto’s have little slices of what looks like Melba Toast in there. Dense, brown toast chips. I love those things, whatever they are.
Wheat Chex are nasty. They are woven from Satan’s pubic hairs.
Thanks to this thread I have two baking sheets of ChexMix in the oven as I type. Heavy on the Worchestershire and garlic, add some pepper sauce and Tiger Sauce to the mix. Smells heavenly!
Just use the whole box and multiply every other amount by 3/2; since this isn’t complex cooking, the proportions shouldn’t be messed up. More yummy Chex Mix!
(DAMN, I want Chex Mix now. But we have no suitable cereal.)
Some people even try (apostate!) to delete the wheat chex, thinking that “nobody will notice” (you hear this from the yoghurt in-lieu-of sour-cream crowd, somebody please, tell them); while I would never eat wheat chex for breakfast, it seems to play an important part of a proper Chex party mix. The Gardettos - aren’t they a similar clone but utilize those garlicy tiny melba toast guys? They are worth it just for those bits of arteriosclerotic nirvana.
The Chris Mix is the best of the Gardetto snacks.
Experience here: Three small boxes of Chex mix will make 4 batches of the recipie I typed in. You’ll need 3 sticks of butter for that amount.
The best homemade chex mixes are 10 times better than the best commercial ones.
And they MUST have worchestershire sauce!! It’s the rule!
Warm Chex-Mix…yum. This batch I made with Archer Farms jalapeno crackers and asiago cheese crackers added to the mix. Who needs dinner? I’m filling up on this tonight!
Since Chex Mix is arguably a food-type item (:)), off to Cafe Society this goes!
I was always a purist and insisted on baking my Chex Mix…until I tried it in the microwave and realized I could get the same result in less than ten minutes, instead of waiting an hour. Once it cools, it crisps back up and you’d never know it hadn’t been baking for an hour. I do the traditional recipe, but I eliminate the pretzels (bagel chips are blasphemy) and double the nuts (protein!). Sometimes I use Crispix instead, or if I’m making it for my kids, but those Wheat Chex that no one eats are my favorite…they soak up the butter differently. And I even have a special large Pyrex casserole just for zapping my Chex mix in, and a dedicated mixing bowl (because I dump it in the mixing bowl to stir it every two minutes…I feel it gets more evenly coated that way than trying to stir it in the dish I bake it in).
I have two boxes of Chex downstairs right now, but my daughter ate all the nuts, so I have to wait. Damn.
I’ve got the BEST recipe for this stuff, from a friend. It calls for everything hot & spicy, and it’s especially good if you double the “sauce” and keep the crunchy bits the same. Check this out:
Crispix, Wheat chex, regular Cheerios, salted peanuts, broken pretzel sticks
butter, celery salt, worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, curry power, chili powder, cayenne, dijon mustard, and garlic juice.
Okay, the recipe calls for mixed nuts, too, but I pass on that and add more Crispix instead.
Yum.
Ugh! No bagel chips.
You gotta have pretzels, peanuts and cashews, though. I’ve actually never had it with hot sauce, although I’m a bit of a hot sauce enthusiast. (I’ve never made the stuff myself.) Maybe I’ll give it a try! I loathe Tabasco, but some Crystal Extra Hot and Arizona Gunslinger Habanero will do the trick nicely, methinks.
Worcestershire sauce, seasoned salt, and onion and garlic powders are totally essential.
Is that the dark brown one? That’s the best one. I eat it for breakfast daily if it’s in the house.
Man, I was seriously heartbroken when the prepackaged Chex mix changed its recipe. My mom and I have made the original Chex mix whenever we’re in the same kitchen for extended periods of time, ever since. This is one of many reasons my mom is the coolest person I will ever know.
Eh. Northern California is crazy over fruit, nuts, and granola, but down here it’s all about carne asada, grilled chicken, beans, cheese and guacamole. Nobody here doesn’t love barbeque chicken pizza–except for the vegans, of course. There have been times when the five ingredients I listed above constituted 70% or more of my diet.
kath94, I must try your recipe (minus Tabasco–yecch!). It sounds divine.
Rye chips. I waver between loving them and hating them when I remember my chipped tooth.