Weetabix PROTEIN: A novel material for milk absorption

It's been a while and I'm starving and in need of some protein to supplement my daily workout routine. To this end I thought Weetabix PROTEIN would have been the ideal breakfast. Oh was I wrong.











Let's begin this review article on Weetabix's newest innovation.
On the face of it, Weetabix is a great breakfast idea; a biscuit snack (I can't give it the label of cereal despite being wholegrain, in the same way you don't call a Jaffa cake a biscuit) low in fat, high in carbs, protein and fibres to get you through the day. In reality you're better off eating porridge as that's basically what you get.
This is clear by just looking at the - as yet unscientifically recognised - Milk Absorption Ratio (MAR), a whopping 0.92. Higher than any cereal to date!

I'd like to draw your attention to a novel material of scientific interest

Vantablack is a carbon nanotube based coating that absorbs >99.9% of the light incident upon it in the visible spectrum. This means that hardly any light is reflected and Vantablack is dubbed the darkest material ever. This material is so black your eyes cannot resolve detail on its surface, it could be perfectly flat or roughened you couldn't tell visually. Why do I use Vantablack as a comparison? Because I'm making the exaggerating claim that Weetabix is to milk what Vantablack is to light.

Is such a massively high MAR a bad thing?
Well this is all down to personal opinion. I would argue yes, any MAR >0.5 can have severe negative effects on the texture, crunch and therein quality of the cereal experience. Part of eating a breakfast cereal is the enjoyable sounds of crunching and crisping as you chomp down spoonful after spoonful of breakfast bliss. Simply put, Weetabix PROTEIN does not provide this essential part of breakfast time for me, after mere seconds of the milk interacting with the two ‘biscuits’ I was left with a metastable biscuit-looking mulch that, upon digging in with my spoon, turned to mush in the pitiful remainder of milk forming a sad looking soup.

In addition, I must talk about the taste. I wasn't blown away with the flavouring of my mush, I had thought the addition of a banana or strawberry would help, but if you have to proactively add external flavourings to the cereal then why not just buy Weetabix Banana.

Overall I was quite disappointed with the whole experience, so much so that I didn't even consider it worth testing for the proteins they claim to be in the cereal, for that reason I give this relatively expensive and unenjoyable cereal a

2/10

Try again Weetabix!

Chosen By you : Strawberry Flavour Milkshake Malties

 It's Saturday evening and what am I doing eating a bowl of cereal. Not just any cereal, a new cereal by ASDA, apparently chosen by us, although I've not yet been consulted on cereals by this supermarket. Despite this, after eating said cereal I can only surmise that 'chosen by you' in fact means chosen soulless husks with no idea of flavour or taste except that of dried cardboard, As you can tell, I'm not a fan, but let me take you on a journey.

 You can clearly see the idea of this cereal, Coco-Pops has chocolatey milk, as does Coco Shreddies, so the next logical step is something that turns milky strawberry-ey, right ? I get the idea.

Now I'd like to point out my patented MAR metric was not used in this review as unfortunately, the batteries in my kitchen scales died. Not to worry! There is still a scientific measure of sorts in this review, which I will layout later.

So we start off with the bowl imaged below:

 Looks okay on the face of it, the standard cross hatched structure for maximal amount of surface area interaction for the tongue I like it! Although what I wasn't a fan of was the strawberry 'coating,' I mean, they're not red, they are brown, the only hints of red are small fleks of colouring periodically which look akin to blood splatter patterns, so I continued eating assuming of course this is strawberry and not the result of some brutal murder at the factory.

I added the requisite amount of milk as guided by the side of the packet and began chomping spoonfuls of this new cereal.

The texture wasn't brilliant, the cross hatched structure felt strange and alien to my tongue, and despite the weakest taste of something sweet / sugary, I assume being the artificial flavourings to simulate strawberry, the fundamental cereal bit was displeasing, On top of the aforementioned texture, the crunch wasn't there as much as I'd like it, infact after a short while the cereal became very mushy, which is not what you want from a square cereal. If you want mush, go for porridge, or leave Weetabix in a bowl of milk for 2.8ms.

The whole hook of this is the strawberry flavour, which yes I got in some regard, although at minimal, and in fact a very clever advertising ploy, for what I wanted to be strawberry flavour was actually closer to strawberry milkshake flavour (even with no milk on). I digress, the whole point of flavoured milk is for the finishing slurps. The extra few mL of milk in the bowl that you can guzzle down like a kid and not care of who is watching. In this case you want strawberry flavoured milk. But after a while of leaving the cereal I was disappointed to see little / no colour change. Unfortunately I didn't have a picture of this, but let me paint you a picture of the milk colour afterwards.
Imagine a glass of milk, now imagine puting a strawberry next to the milk and hoping diffusion or some other transport mechanism moved the redness of that strawberry to the milk. That is how the milk looked. Infact I was so confused by this lack of mixing of the strawberry flavouring I decided to do some science......

Imaged above a the Jasco V-570 Spectrophotometer. The basic working principles of this machine is to shine a light on a sample and then measure what light goes through, or gets reflected, regardless it gives an idea of what a material is and how concentrated it is.
So I got 2 vials of equal volumes semi-skimmed milk (bought from a farmer because we should pay fair!)

And into one of them I added a single cereal square, now I did the calculation and the amount of milk I used obeys the same ratio as 30g:125mL of cereal : milk advised on the cereal packaging, just scaled down.
I left both sample for 10 minutes under ambient conditions to allow for flavour mixing of the admixture.
Using a pipette I then removed equal volumes of the mixture and placed 2 drops into a vessel containing deionised water

I then used the spectrophotometer, initially performing a base line correction with no sample in.

Above, the results obtained from this experimental venture. The blue line corresponds to plain water, the red and green line to raw milk product and strawberry admixture respectively. Now with my limited knowledge of this technique I can say that the peaks above 1500 are most likely absorption lines of water the interesting feature is the doublet that may be in the blue line at ~1250nm but becomes clearly resolvable in the red and green traces, also, it is clear there is most absorption in the visible end of the spectrum in the milky mixture. What I cannot see are new absorption lines associated with supposed strawberry flavouring. The obvious slap-dash totally believable because it's science and definitely has no flaws in what so every is this milky strawberry mix had no strawberries in it! How can I say that, I don't know, I don't know what the absorption spectra of strawberries looks like or milk for that matter, what I can say is those two traces are basically the same.

Overall:
I wasn't chuffed with this the cereal component left me bitter and disappointed, I'm not going to say it was the worst thing I've ever eaten, as I've once eaten at  Harvester, and it's probably not the worst cereal ever. I think my main issues was the lack of fulfilment of expectations, I pushed through the taste stirring vigorously hoping for some delicious pink fluid at the end of my venture, and it was taken away from me.
FOR THAT REASON, I give this cereal a

2/10

I'd like to add, it won some points mainly on pricing, it was £1.18 for the box, but to be fair, I wouldn't even recommend this to the poor.

Craving Cereal...Choco-Squares #2

It's only the beginning, but I feel it time to go and calibrate my findings on cheap choco-squares by sampling the popular Kellog's Krave.

So I went out to the local shop with my pennies and purchased regular old vanilla style Krave and have just finished eating.

Now the unfortunate thing about all choco-squares and quite a lot of cereals is the boxes are becoming ever smaller, and at £2.99 per 375 gram this makes Krave much more expensive than Asda equivalent.

2 for 1

I noticed upon opening these pillows were significantly smaller than the Asda equivalent I previously munched down on, to this end I can only assume this must result in a higher chocolate density per mouthful.

















Before I move onto the all important taste test I want to draw attention back to the box and packaging with a few observations.

1. Kellog's tagline beneath their logo ''We don't make cereals for anyone else.'' Bit of a poor business ploy if they don't intend to sell to anyone except myself, I can think of no other meaning of that statement
2. In an inviting green worded label round the box (designed for us to make us think it's healthy) is the statement of the purpose of B vitamins and Iron, but next to it the words:

'Chocolate - For a delicious Chocolate experience'

Now this recursive statement is I guess okay, except when combined with the top description ''Contains a chocolate/hazelnut flavour.''

I suddenly got scared of eating this, a brown substance in the centre of my cereal I assumed to be chocolate is not chocolate, but chocolate flavoured...suspicious.

Right, to the consumption!

Pre-Consumption MAR

Naturally I began as anyone in the cereal business would, and measured the MAR (Milk Absorbance Ratio) and the value came out to be 0.23333 (recurring of course). Now this is already a startling revelation, for the same mass of cereal the MAR is about twice the value for the equivalent choco-squares from Asda (0.12) could this be predominantly due to the proportionality larger surface area because I'm using the same mass of cereals in both cases...probable, but let's not jump to conclusions.

The Dry Run

As any whisky drinker may say, try your product before adding the liquid. See below for a.....Sound Bite (chortle) 

And then adding milk a notable decrease in crunch-ability, quite expected.

The initial mouthful let my tongue explore a velvety surface, all apparent powder and roughness seemed to have vanished, the wetness of the milk and the smooth surface allowed the pillow to move freely around my taste-buds, however the flavour was quite bland.

Upon that crunch, oh that wonderful crunch, a firework of sensations rushed to my brain as my tastebuds were hit by a sweet chocolatey taste, and true to advertising hints of hazlenut. Now despite not being real chocolate, but chocolate flavour, my brain didn't care so much and was tricked into releasing endorphins and serotonin making me feel happy with myself and oblivious to the fact I am eating cereal at eight pm.

This flavour didn't linger, it quickly dissolved into the background of my sense making me want more, forcing me to repeat this menagerie of milk and mouth. Next thing I knew it was over, I was left with a yellowish milky substance at the bottom of the bowl, which was very sweet, but not sickly sweet. 

Overall I was pleased with the inner chocolatey taste provided, and when purchasing choco-squares that is but half of what I expect (the other hald being a square shape).  I was most won over by the smooth outer shell, smooth like those fancy socks you can buy that are so smooth and fluffy, yet degrade after one wash (you know the ones). Despite this smoothness around the shell, and for it's small size, I felt for sure with such a high MAR the shell would be a mush distasteful to chew. I was wrong, as evident from the sound clip, it still yielded a satisfying crunch which left me yearning for more Krave.

Final Thoughts

Price: 4/10 Despite being ludicrously expensive, it is a trend that is becoming more apparent, and supermarkets know this and often do some great deals to make them reasonably priced.
Flavour: 8/10 That delicuous imitation chocolate flavouring must have done something making me want more..very clever Kellog's
CRUNCH: 8/10  The dryness/crunch is a hard metric to score, some times a wet cereal is ideal, others crunchy is necessary. In this case I gave an 8 as i enjoyed the crunch despite the high MAR, and I can't stress enough the smoothness of the shell. Try it yourself.

Overall 6.5/10

I feel this cereal is superior in taste and form to it's counterpart, however I do not believe it is worth being ~3x the price.

Cereal #1 - Chocolatey Squares

Whoever invented the concept of chocolatey squares deserves a medal.
There are however so many varieties, do I go for well branded 'Krave' which is costly, or is there better choice in cheaper alternatives. Who has the time and effort to find out? Well, I have nothing better to do, so why not.
Through this I'm going to sample and review a variety of chocolatey squares and come up with the best option.

So let's dig in.

Cereal # 1
The first chocolatey squares I have acquired is Asda ''Chosen by you'' Choco Squares (see figure 1). The name sort of implies they must be good, as they were chosen by you, the well knowing public, so I was quite excited to open the box.

Figure 1: How can you refuse an offer from a cereal bear

Now first a few details:

• Asda choco squares were marked at the time of purchase (02/01/14) at 97 pence! Which when compared to a leading brand of choco squares (Krave) at £2.78, is a massive saving. So do we sacrifice taste and substance for a sub-pound cereal?

• The next detail I'd like to introduce is the concept of what I call the Milk Absorption Ratio (MAR) illustrated in figure 2. This is a number between 0 and 1 and is calculated in the following way:
• Add known mass / volume of milk to cereal.
• Wait 30seconds.
• Pass milk cereal complex through a sieve.
• Measure mass of milk remaining.
• Re-add milk to cereal.
• Enjoy cereal.

Figure 2: "I know of only one way to eat cereal, with science'':- Abraham Lincoln

Quite a simple calculation that will tell us how much milk is absorbed into the cereal, giving us a way of quantifying how soggy a cereal can be. There are other things I'm working on, notably a spectroscopic technique to measure colour change of milk post cereal consumption to determine how flavoursome leftover milk will be.

Right, back to the cereal.

First off, the calculated MAR was 0.12, so my guess in advance would be a fairly dry cereal. An initial taste with no milk produced quite a crumbly, powdery substance in my mouth, with little taste of chocolate, the dryness suppressed the senses, and with a MAR of merely 0.12, I thought little would change upon addition of semi-skimmed bovine lactate emulsion.

I was wrong, the choco-squares were surprisingly tasty, the 'pillow' was quite thick and managed to absorb some milk round the outer shell, that couldn't quite diffuse all the way through. The result of this gave a soft chewable exterior, but still a distinct satisfying crunch towards the middle. 

But what of the chocolate.

The thickness of the pillow left little room for much of a chocolatey core, and what chocolate was present didn't possess the soft consistency of Nutella or the inside bit of a Ferrero Rocher one would hope. Despite this, there was enough chocolate to satisfy my taste-buds giving occasions of a sweet almost almond flavour. 

So as time is fleeting i'll get to the final numerical review, which is measured out of 10 as my satisfaction with the variables labelled.

Price: 9/10 - I was overjoyed to see a sub-pound chocolatey square cereal 

Dryness:  6/10 - Cereal gave a satisfying crunchy texture, but was not too dry, nor too soggy.

Flavour: 5/10 -  quite sweet, although not in a chocolatey sense, I'm a bit suspicious of the no artificial flavourings remark, but hey ho.

Overall   6/10

Good job Asda, or should I say the public for choosing it.