I’ve seen many of my readers posting MyCerealMix shots on Instagram, so I was over-the-moon excited when the company gave me the opportunity to try it for myself.
MyCerealMix is a company that allows you to create your own cereal creations using a variety of healthy and fun mix-ins, like freeze-dried fruit, cacao nibs, chia seeds, nuts, and more. You can personalize the base (you can stick to oats or you can go for different grains–even rice crisps!), choose whatever mix-ins you want for no extra cost (it’s a flat-rate bag of deliciousness for $9.99, even if you add five servings of cacao nibs!), and have full control over whether any sweeteners (xylitol and bee pollen) or powders (protein and wheat grass) are added.
For my bag, I went with:
- Oats, because I’m classic
- Chia seeds, because they make my tummy feel good
- Goji berries, because I’ve honestly never had one before (!!)
- Freeze-dried strawberries, mangos, and raspberries, because NUMMY
- Cacao nibs, because chocolate makes everything better
- Coconut, because coconut makes everything better
Confession: when I ordered this, I thought these were oats I was supposed to cook, so I opted out of adding any nuts (because I prefer to add nuts as a topping after cooking, to help them retain their crunch). Had I known I would be eating this muesli style, I would have definitely had nuts and left out the chia seeds.
Side note: cacao nibs are not simply a fancy, chopped-up version of chocolate chips. They are purely cacao–nothing else–and they are crunchy and magical. You might expect pure cacao to be unpleasantly bitter, but the size of them adds an addictive, chocolatey crunch to just about anything. I wouldn’t recommend eating them plain by the handful, but they are so, so good in nice cream, for example.
On to the taste test! ?
The cacao nibs were at their boldest, the coconut was fresh and crispy, and the ratio of oats to mix-ins was perfectly balanced. The freeze-dried fruits do not get to soak up liquid like they would in a stove-top or overnight oatmeal, so if you do not like the texture of freeze-dried fruits, you may want to let your muesli sit in milk for 10-15 minutes before eating. (Many people do this anyway with their muesli, but I don’t have that kind of patience.)
Bonus! MyCerealMix on the stove:
I have an addiction to hot oats, so I just had to try this out. I also wanted to see what would happen to the cacao nibs when cooked. To my surprise, the the maintained their form (as you can observe in the above photo). While chocolate chips would have melted and made the entire porridge fudgy, these nibs–as I hoped–kept their shape, even when cooked over a stove.
The package does not list cooking instructions, which should have been enough reason for me to not try cooking it, but I was feeling adventurous. It was tough to get the ratio of cereal to liquid right (given that the cereal is not simply oats but a variety of ingredients that do not soak up liquid in the same way), and I ended up adding a bit of quick oats to the saucepan because I definitely had a pool of cashew milk at the top that refused to go anywhere.
After that, the porridge successfully came together. It was flavorful, definitely, but not as good as its muesli form. However, that might be because I’m into quick cook steel cut oats right now, and I’m not a big fan of rolled oats in hot porridge anymore.
i.e. Follow the rules and eat this as a muesli. Just because you can cook it doesn’t mean you should. ?
In summary:
- this cereal is literally cereal–hence why you can get it with something like rice crisps
- when you pick your mix-ins, be mindful of the fact that you will be eating all of this raw, and plan accordingly!
- always say YES to cacao nibs!
- I didn’t add any sweeteners and I was pleased with the flavor, so if you typically like my recipes, you probably won’t need any xylitol in yours
- crunch is important in muesli–add some type of nut, seed, or crispy grain
- cooking it as a porridge is possible but not exactly recommended ?
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