Dallas' Cereal Structural Index

I keep making promises that I can’t keep.  Here is the content I said I’d put up two days ago.  Some more food (breakfast cereal, obvs) for thought. 

Over the coming months I will try and be more quantitative with my blogging.  While verbal descriptions are sufficient for most, I like to categorise things my number (I like to organise my sock drawer from 1-5, from left to right, 5 being wank socks and 1 being my favourite socks), which is how the DCSI was conceived.  I feel it may be incomplete, and that there may be grey areas within the categories, so please let me know if there are.  I welcome any suggestions. 

So, put simply: the DCSI is a descriptive index for categorising cereal textures.  Too often have I bought a granola or “muesli” that has been too hard for my liking, or a new brand of cereal that turns soft and mushy in under 3.5 minutes of milk contact.  It is a fairly rudimentary index, but I feel it will be useful all the same.  I can picture readers sitting down to their bowl of breakfast cereal and thinking “I reckon this is a 5”, much like I do these days. 

 

I had created an pretty table on excel, that was colour coded and everything, but I can't work out a way to put it up on here in a format that is visible (I can't enter it as a picture) therefore, I will simply list the categories in as organised a manner as I can manage in absence of a table.  Categories are numbered 1-7 and hold the following upshots:

 

1. Unyielding, remains hard until end of bowl.  Example: granola

 

2. Partly softens but contains unyielding ingredients.  Example: Dorset Cereal

 

3. Stay reasonably hard/crunchy but loses some structural integrity.  Example: Jordan's Country Crisp (The Supercilious Cereal).

 

4. Become soft but generally retain a hard core or considerable toughness.  Example: Golden Nuggets (Fools gold?) ***Level 4 also contains level 5s that are subject to the Cereal Killer Coating Hypothesis. 

 

5. Crunchy/tough at the beginning of bowl; soggy by the end.  Eat at normal pace.  Example: Shreddies

 

6. Becomes soft quickly.  Eat with haste.  Example: Weetabix. 

 

7. Breakfast cereals served hot and soggy.  Example: hot Weetabix/Porridge

 

So there we have it: DCSI.  I hope you find this a useful tool as you begin to realise the importance of texture on a breakfast cereal experience, and I hope to usefully utilise it in my future reviews (there are some on the way, I promise).