Rice Krispies or puffed rice cereal are one of the most popular breakfast cereals in the World… in this video I attempt to make homemade rice krispies, plus show you how to make marshmallow from scratch and use that to make rice krispie treats! See how I get on! Am I a cereal killer or should we just stick to classic packaged ones?!
After making the homemade cornflakes project, I had to give this a try….
Well, if you haven’t watched the video already yet you’ll know that I had quite a ‘fun’ time until finally cracking the rice krispies recipe! So here are my tips for making it along side a recipe for the marshmallow and the rice krispie treats.
So for the rice I think that long grain rice worked the best, certainly not sushi rice, it was far too sticky and joined together. So start by cooking your rice to package instructions – normally 10minutes or so into boiling water with the malt, sugar and salt. Drain and spread out onto a lined baking tray.
Now I spread mine out in one thin layer, but I don’t think this matters. What is important is that you don’t toast the rice. So pre-heat an oven, not fan just standard to 120c. This is a nice low temperature that will slowly dry out the rice but not toast it.
If you toast the rice it will go hard and brown in colour, if you’ve done it right it will look the same colour but be a little harder. Almost how it was before boiling! So bake the rice for 2 hours and remove from the oven. Then put it in the fridge for an hour once at room temperature, you don’t have to do that, but it certainly helped me and I’d seen that suggestion online.
Now get the sunflower oil hot to around 220c, carefully lower the rice into a sieve and it should rice to the surface within seconds and be puffed, this is rice krispies! Now I found that some of mine would rise and others would not and would simply stay at the bottom and brown, don’t worry about these, maybe they were still not dried out or something, but don’t risk it scoop out the good ones! And that’s it repeat draining the puffed rice on kitchen towel and you are done!
Now homemade marshmallow is delicious, time consuming, but yummy! First up whip 3 egg whites in a bowl until soft peaks form. Also soak the gelatine leaves in a bowl to one side to soften with 200ml water.
Grab a large saucepan and add the sugar (yep, it’s a lot), liquid glucose and 300ml cold water together. Stir until the sugar dissolves and warm the pan up. Warm it to 130c which you will need a candy thermometer for and will take a good ten mins or so to hit that temperature.
Once the temperature is achieved remove from the heat and carefully pour in the gelatin leaves and water, stirring carefully (it will bubble up!) until it is dissolved. Leave to rest for a few minutes.
Meanwhile line a square tin with cling film and lightly oil it, giving a gentle dusting of some of the icing sugar and cornflour mix, this will stop it sticking later.
Carefully pour the sugar mix from the pan into the bowl that you have the egg whites in doing this in small batches whisking as you go on a low setting, keep whisking until the sugar mixture is all in there and then keep the whisk going for 10 minutes. This helps mix the gelatin evenly whilst it cools and you will notice it has thickened after ten minutes too. Add the vanilla extract just before stopping the whisking, or any other flavouring / colouring you like.
Pour this mixture into the prepared tin and then leave to set at room temperature for a couple of hours. Once ready to remove dust icing sugar and cornflour onto baking parchment on a board and turn the marshmallow out onto it. Dust some more if needed and slice up!
Now to make rice krispies treats simply melt the butter in a large saucepan with the marshmallow (freshly made as above or store bought). Once it is nice and lump free from melting pour in the rice krispies, stir to coat fully and then push into a lined baking tin. Leave to cool and slice up!
So there we have it, you can potentially make rice krispies squares from scratch using the above steps and a fair bit of patience, good luck!