I am adding a new category to my blog called “real food.” It’s going to be a place where I can post recipes (or links to recipes) for real versions of much of the stuff we buy for convenience that contain things like added food coloring and other stuff to “enhance” the product.
This first Cheez It recipe was stumbled upon by Kelly, who just so happens to LOVE the boxed kind. And we just so happen to have a box in the house. I decided to look at the label.
Mistake. Mistake. Mistake.
At first it looked pretty good. I recognized most of the ingredients.
Then I looked up Paprika Oleoresin. Ew. That second word doesn’t sound so great.
Turns out it’s not.
At first glance, it doesn’t look so bad. You can read the Wikipedia description I linked to yourself. Then I came to this sentence:
Extraction is performed by percolation with a variety of solvents, primarily hexane, which are removed prior to use. Hmm, I wondered. What is hexane?
Again, from Wikipedia:
Hexanes are significant constituents of gasoline. They are all colorless liquids at room temperature, with boiling points between 50 and 70 °C, with gasoline-like odor. They are widely used as cheap, relatively safe, largely unreactive, and easily evaporated non-polar solvents.
Not sure what the last sentence means, but you can follow the links if you want to know more. I don’t.
There are a couple of other ingredients I don’t recognize, but frankly, it doesn’t matter if they turn out to be okay. They had me at “gasoline.”
Kelly made up a batch from the recipe she found. Delicious! Now, we all know Cheez Its – in any form – aren’t the healthiest thing around, and these are full of (good-tasting) fat. But at least they are real!
Note: The recipe says to cut them into 2″ sizes. They really don’t shrink when cooking, so cut them into whatever size you would like the final crackers to be.