Cereal Milk

Cereal milk is my homage to steeped milk.

When I worked at wd~50, we played around infusing milk with all kinds of ingredients–grains, spices, just about anything. Some combinations worked better than others. Some were good, like sesame ice cream. Some were epic, like toast ice cream. (Imagine a perfect piece of diner toast–golden brown, crisp but not so crisp it scrapes the roof of your mouth, saturated in lightly salted butter–and now imagine that as an ice-cream flavor.)

Cereal milk, by comparison, seems almost dumb. Anyone who’s ever spent a lazy Saturday morning, drowning in holey sweatpants, watching hour after hour of USA reruns knows the flavor: It’s that dense, tasty, slightly sweet, kind of starchy, corny milk from the bottom of the cereal bowl.

The seed for it was planted when we were preparing for our spring-to-summer menu changeover, and the then-chef had cornbread ice cream on the mind. I probably made 10 different versions of homemade cornbread, but we couldn’t get the corny flavor and guilty pleasure of piping-hot-out-of-the-oven-Jiffy-corn bread just right with my homemade versions. What we got instead were a lot of infused milk tests that all tasted like lame versions of cereal: one tasted like Kix, one like Corn Pops, one like Rice Krispies, one like Special K. They weren’t what we were looking for. But, for whatever reason, I felt like I’d learned a secret: milk infusions could hit as close to home as the bottom of my cereal bowl and I happily gulped each failed corn bread milk turned cereal-flavored milk. I filed the idea away deep in the vault and got back to work.

The idea resurfaced when we were opening Ko and our dessert menu had nothing on it. And the new freezer that was supposed to hold the ice cream for that nonexistent dessert menu was on the fritz. The hype was unbearable, and I was screwed. I needed a dessert, period. A backup dessert would be nice too. And if I was smart about it, it would be one that didn’t need to be frozen to be good: panna cotta fit that bill perfectly. Now, making a good panna cotta–creamy, set just enough to hold its shape but melt in your mouth–is pretty easy. But making an interesting panna cotta–that’s the hard part.

I knew what I had to do. I had been training for this moment for years: do a milk infusion. I gave the cereal milk idea a shot. Bull’s-eye. Everybody loved it. The funny part is that we worked backward from there. My intention was only to make a cereal milk panna cotta. But owner David Chang, pushy, pushy man that he is, forcefully reminded me on many occasions that I should, at the very least, make cereal milk into ice cream. We simplified it even further, too, to create a line of flavored cereal milk to sell at Milk Bar. We make our cereal milk with classy old Corn Flakes, but we’ve also been known to steep Fruity Pebbles, Cap’n Crunch, and Lucky Charms. (See “Cereal Milk Variations” following the recipe.)

Regardless of whether cereal milk is the beverage for you, the technique–steeping and seasoning milk, then using that milk to make desserts–is a versatile one that exists in pastry and savory kitchens all over the world. It’s a technique that’s simple and totally accessible in your own home kitchen as well.

This was by no means the first recipe that came out of our kitchens, but it is far and away the most popular and what we are known best for. Drink it straight, pour it over more cereal, add it to your coffee in the morning, or turn it into panna cotta or ice cream. Cereal milk. It’s a way of life.–Christina Tosi