Furikake Chex Mix

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Furikake Chex Mix

Furikake chex mix is a Japanese-Hawaiian-style party mix. It's sweet and buttery, a little savory, and really good. Like any chex mix recipe, it's pretty much foolproof. The key is to choose dry ingredients which taste good to you. Use Cheerios if you love Cheerios, don't use pretzels if you hate pretzels. That way the worst that can happen is it tastes like it's not mixed uniformly (which can easily happen if it's your first time making it), but it still tastes ok. If it's for a wide audience, go with a "safe" combination of dry ingredients (like the below list), and maybe go a little lighter on the furikake.

If you're not sure what furikake is, see the first bullet under "Some final hints" below.

wet ingredients:
  5.3 oz butter (1 1/3 stick)
  3 T    sugar
  5.6 oz light corn syrup (½ C)
  2 t    shoyu (soy sauce) 
  1.8 oz vegetable oil (¼ C)
dry ingredients (for example):
  5 oz   honeycomb cereal (1/3 box)
  4 oz   crispix cereal (1/3 box)
  5 oz   cheerios cereal (1/3 box)
  1 oz   furikake (½ bottle)
  3 oz   butter snap pretzels (1/3 bag), add last
  12 oz  honey roasted peanuts (1 can), add last
1. Heat wet ingredients to dissolve sugar.
2. Toss with dry ingredients to coat.
3. Bake at 250º for 1 hour, stirring every 15 minutes.
4. Cool.  Store in airtight container.

The above recipe is the result of many trials tailored to meet several requirements, the primary one being the capacity of my large 17x"12x"2" rectangular roasting pan(!). I studied a half dozen recipes I found online back in 2004, then started with one that sounded the most promising (unfortunately, the page longer exists so I cannot link to it).

The next step was to choose the dry ingredients. I wanted to use Bugles crispy corn snacks, but they're really hard to find in our local supermarkets. In addition to taste, another consideration was volume relative to my aforementioned rectangular pan. It turns out one 14.5 oz box of Honeycomb cereal, one 12 oz box of Crispix cereal, and one 9 oz bag of Snyder's butter snaps pretzels will make two pans of dry ingredients.

The original recipe for the wet ingredients was not quite enough for the selected dry ingredients, plus it was too strong on shoyu and too light on butter and sweetness, so much tweaking occurred over the next several trials. I also reduced the furikake from one whole bottle down to a half bottle. The honey roasted nuts were a later addition. Still later I tried adding a third box of cereal, to add another taste and to make three pans of mix instead of two. At this point I started going with 1 1/3 sticks of butter, to evenly divide a 4-pack of sticks into three batches. We thought Cheerios came out better than Rice Chex.

To be truthful, each time I make this it's a little different, because I'll just use what I happen to have on hand.

This is obviously not a low carb snack. What I do nowadays is add extra nuts, and eat a few of those while others eat the cereal bits.

Some final hints:

if you're not sure what kind of furikake to get (or even what it is), I would recommend sticking with a simple flavor. Shirakiku Aji Nori Furikake is a good choice, as is JFC Nori Fumi Furikake. Using a fishy flavor (e.g. salmon, katsuo, kozakana, ebi) will probably taste strange, and I shudder to think how natto (fermented soy bean) furikake chex mix would taste! However, I'm sure any furikake would taste great sprinkled on rice (its original intent).
if you're heating the syrup in a microwave oven, watch it carefully to avoid the butter frothing up out of the container (*)
the easiest way to measure the dry ingredients is using a scale. If you don't have one, here are the approximate measurements: 5½C Honeycomb, 4C Crispix, 5C Cheerios or Rice Chex, 1¾C pretzels.
to more evenly coat the ingredients:
- start with just the cereals and add the syrup in several applications. For each application use a large wooden spoon to drizzle the syrup evenly over the dry ingredients then mix thoroughly.
- next mix in the furikake in several applications
- mix in the pretzel squares and honey roasted peanuts last
the honey roasted coating may be gone from the peanuts by the end of the baking process, but it ends up in the chex mix so it's all good!
after the baking is done, be sure to stir/loosen the mix in the pan while it is still warm, before it hardens into a solid mass (*)
make sure the oven is set to "bake" not "broil" (*)

(*) don't ask me how I know

This article is part of the seeking42 recipe series (first posted online and updated 2004 - 2010).