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Round 1m contenders:
CerealWars Round 1m
This time I inadvertently ended up grabbing two cereals which were just different versions of cereals I had already tried. The Fibre1 version I got this time was "Crunchy Original" and the Cheerios were multi-grain.
The notable thing about the Fibre1 cereal was that instead of having the cereal contained within a single bag inside the box like every other cereal, they had two half-bags sitting in there side by side. Which was pretty unnecessary. It would be a good thing to do for cereals that wick up moisture easily and get soggy if you leave them there for too long. However, the Fibre1 was the complete opposite of that: even after dousing it in milk it tasted really dry. Somehow it managed to stave off absorbing any of the milk so when I ate it, it disintegrated into powdery dust in my mouth. And it tasted weird, too.
The cheerios, on the other hand, taste like any other box of cheerios: nothing fantastic, but something you wouldn't mind eating. A reliable cereal that you know won't surprise you either way. Reminds me of the saying "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" (although of late it's been Microsoft rather than IBM). Cheerios is the IBM of cereals.
Anyway, given that the Fibre1 wasn't that good, Cheerios wins!
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Round 1l contenders:
CerealWars Round 1l
I actually finished these cereals a while ago but I've been too lazy to post about them. In fact I've kind of forgotten what they were like. I believe I declared the honey bunches of oats the winner.. there weren't a lot of oats in it though. But the flakes were certainly light and crispy and tasted pretty good.
The banana strawberry one barely had any fruit at all, and was composed of very tiny pieces of stuff, all of which floated in the milk. So it was this paradoxical cereal which was really light (because it floated) but also very heavy (because the cereal was densely packed). Anyway, it wasn't as good. Not horrible, though.
On a meta-note, I seem to be running out of steam with this cereal wars stuff. Does anybody have any cereals they want me to throw in the ring?
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Round 1k contenders:
CerealWars Round 1k
So.. here are 7 reasons to *not* get the 7 Reasons cereal:
- 7 Reasons is a lame name
- When you pour milk on it, the scoop-shaped cereal shoots the milk right back in your face
- The scoop-shaped cereal does not make for a happy experience in the mouth
- Golden Grahams is better
Ok, so that's not really 7 reasons. But I covered all the important points, I think. Golden Grahams does tend to get soggy faster, but taste-wise it's way better. And item 2 in the list above is actually quite annoying and caused multiple milk spills.
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Round 1j contenders:
CerealWars Round 1j
I went back to some more standard cereals on this round: Cheerios and Vector. There isn't that much to say about these cereals. They're both pretty good taste-wise, and both retain their shape and texture in milk pretty well. I cannot think of a single remarkable property of either cereal. Except of course, that Cheerios are donut-shaped which isn't that common for a cereal.
And I guess that's the deciding factor here... Cheerios win!
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Since my arm is broken, typing is kind of a chore. So I'm going to keep this short and to the point. Round 1i contenders:
CerealWars Round 1i
Making a cereal 50% random-crap-I-found does not make it good, particularly when the random crap has a non-empty intersection with the set of things that must never be doused in milk. Like peanuts. Or pumpkin seeds. In fact, pumpkin seeds is on the list of things that shouldn't even be ingested.
Muesli, you lose, pretentious umlauts and all. Crunchy almond thingy, you win.
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In round 1h, the contenders were Force Active and Special K.
CerealWars Round 1h
Really this should be called the battle of the funny-named cereals. What kind of a name is "Force Active"? It's the kind of name that doesn't require a French translation, that's what. Force Active is Force Active in both languages, and I'm sure that must have been the guiding factor in their selection of the name, because there's no other reason I can think of that they would choose it.
And on the other side we've got Special K. With red berries. I can only assume the K stands for Kellogg's. But what makes it so special? And what's with the "red berries"? What non-strawberry red berries does it contain? Answer: none.
Anyway, ordinarily in cases like this, where there's one cereal with fruit and the other without, it would be a slam dunk in favor of the fruited one. But I hesitate here because for the strawberries in the Special K cereal weren't all that good. I don't know what it was, maybe I just got a bad box or something, but the strawberries weren't exactly exploding with flavor. They tasted pretty bland, actually. The cereal itself was otherwise pretty standard corn flakes, hard to go wrong with that.
The Force Active cereal was pretty good. It had rice/wheat flakes with granola clusters, and just the right amount of granola I think. The combination was good, the consistency was good, and it didn't have a mountain of cereal dust at the bottom of the box like the Special K did. Still, on the whole, there wasn't anything remarkable about this cereal other than the name, and the taste of it is quickly fading from my memory.
It's a tough call, but I think in this case the winner is Special K, but only because their sorry excuse for fruit was still better than not having fruit at all. Take that away and Force Active would beat it senseless. With force. Actively.
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For round 1g, I decided to pick up another chocolatey cereal that caught my eye: the PC Double Chocolate Crunch (hereafter referred to as PCDCC). Doesn't the box just look so tasty? And going against it is a box of Diamond Shreddies. I think the guys at the Shreddies factory messed up though, since my box clearly contained Shreddies in both the diamond and square varieties. (The diamond ones were better, of course). :)
CerealWars Round 1g
I have to say, the box of PCDCC is the best chocolate-cereal I've had. It's just a smidge too sweet, but only a smidge. Mixing chocolate and granola the way they've done is pretty awesome, particularly when tossed in a bowl of milk. The annoying thing about this cereal was that it did leave behind annoying little crumbs in the milk, but there weren't a lot of those. The cereal is also a little on the heavy side, but again, not too bad.
The Shreddies are... well, Shreddies. They have a more or less neutral cereal taste. Nothing spectacular on that front. They are nicely self-contained chunks of cereal so not many crumbs get left behind. They also don't get soggy, so they are generally well-behaved in milk. On the whole it's a pretty decent cereal, but when comparing it to the PCDCC box, it falls behind in the taste department.
Something else to consider when going for a chocolate cereal is the actual sugar content. PCDCC has 9g of fat and 13g of sugar per 55g serving, which is a little high but not as bad as.. say, Captain Crunch. I tend to burn a lot of sugar so I don't consider this too bad, but YMMV. For comparison, the Shreddies have 1g of fat and 8g of sugar per 50g serving, significantly lower.
Anyhow, this round goes to PCDCC, but props to Shreddies for being a pretty good contender.
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Round 1f has come and gone, with the results being fairly unsuprising given the contenders:
CerealWars Round 1f
In the white corner, with the apples and strawberries, we've got PC 7-grain. And in the yellow corner, with the raisins and oats, we've got GM's fibre1.
The 7-grain had apples. Apples! I'd never had a cereal with apples before. I was excited to try that one out. Little did I know that these apples weren't regular apples, they were ninja apples. They were so good at hiding I couldn't tell that they were even there. At least they didn't shuriken my mouth. The strawberries were slightly less ninja and put in a token appearance. The cereal itself was light and crispy; there were different types of grains (7, I bet) but on the whole it felt like mostly puffy bits of crunchy stuff (kind of like Rice Krispies). Not too shabby overall.
The fibre1 had a lot of fibre. It said so right on the box... 44% of your daily requirement per serving! But who cares? The determining factor in this cereal turned out to be the raisins. Much like the cranberries in Round 1a, the raisins were really chewy and gummed up my mouth. If you grab a spoonful of cereal and it ends up having 4 or 5 raisins in it, it takes a good minute to get it unstuck from your teeth. At least it did for me. Minus the raisins, this cereal would have been about average - it tasted like most other cereals of its kind; after trying so many all the tastes are starting to run together in my head. But the raisins made it worse.
And so, the winner, as you may have guessed: 7-grain with the ninja apples.
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So, this time I went with a themed battle - I picked two cereals with "crunch" in their name. Harvest Crunch vs. Cap'n Crunch.
CerealWars Round 1e1
Unfortunately, disaster befell when I had my first bowl of Cap'n Crunch. The problem? Every 30g serving of this cereal has 13g of sugar. Eating the cereal is basically like eating flavored sugar, and I felt pretty sick after getting through the first bowl. Rather than continue to torture myself, I decided to give Cap'n Crunch the "sudden death" option (yes, I'm allowed to make up stuff like this) and eliminate it from the competition. It loses, big time.
Since I still had a near-full box of Harvest Crunch left, I decided to pick another box to battle it. In keeping with the "crunch" theme, I got a Crunchy Mixed Berry cereal.
CerealWars Round 1e2
This battle was much better. Harvest Crunch is a pretty decent cereal. My main complaint with it is that it's really dense and packed-together. When you pour out a pile of this cereal into a bowl, you actually end up with more cereal than you thought. A similar-volume pile of any other cereal is much lighter. Nonetheless, the cereal tasted decent and was quite good provided you took into account the higher density.
The mixed berry cereal was better. The addition of a few bits of fruit seems to make all the difference. The flakes themselves were a little too hard and sharp, but they tasted pretty good, so overall I think this cereal came out a little ahead of the Harvest Crunch.
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Round 1d is over. The contenders: President's Choice Organic Granola (with honey and almonds) and Nesquik.
CerealWars Round 1d
So this one was a tough battle, because both cereals turned out to be pretty mediocre. It was hard deciding which was more mediocre than the other. On one side there was the organic granola (actually from the organic aisle at Zehrs, which is on the other side of the store from everything else). I had high hopes for this, but was let down. I could barely taste the honey, and couldn't taste the almonds at all. I could see them floating around in the milk, but they didn't taste like anything. It was disappointing. Also the granola bits were too small, and after getting all the big bits out it looked like dust floating in the milk. Nobody likes dust in their milk.
On the other side, there's Nesquik. It's got chocolatey goodness going for it, but it's a little too sweet. Good crunchiness and chocolatey flavor, but at the end you're left with really sweet milk. Also I'm going to take away some points from them for not actually including their "free magazine subscription or book" inside the package. The box was clearly big enough to hold it, but instead they make you enter a code on a website and wait 6-8 weeks. 6-8 weeks! That's an eternity these days. Although it could have been worse... they could have included a CD of stuff that only runs on Windows.
But getting back to the point at hand, neither of the two cereals impressed me much. I had to try to find some way to pick one. The organic granola one is healthier.. but the Nesquik tastes better. It's a tough call. In the end I asked myself this: if I had to pick one of these cereals to eat for the rest of my life, which would it be? Answer: probably the Nesquik. So that's the one I'm crowning the winner of this battle.
Also, I only realized after I threw out the granola box that I took a picture of the french side of it. Oops.
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