It must be corn Chex. Not rice Chex. Not wheat Chex. It has to be homemade. The powdered sugar needs to be applied using a brown paper bag and shaking. Under no circumstances should you add any extra candies to spice things up. And please, for the love of God, do not call it ‘muddy buddies’.
Now that we’ve gotten the ground rules out of the way, let’s discuss the magic of the chocolate peanut butter crack that made my American childhood sweet.
I love puppy chow. I love the taste, the smell, the texture, even the name. If I started a band, I’d probably call it The Puppy Chow. But what makes puppy chow so good? Of course, chocolate and peanut butter together make the universe make sense. The savory-sweet-bitter mix is the best of all worlds. Cover that in powdered sugar and you’ve got yourself a worthy dessert. PB+chocolate isn’t much of a groundbreaking flavor combo, and what pulls it together is the corn Chex. Corn is sweet, but only subtly. The starchy-ness tames the powdered sugar. Puppy chow is the right amount of everything.
And the crunch! Cereal was made to be drenched in liquids, and hence even when drowned in melty chocolate the Chex stays crunchy. The chocolate on the outside doesn’t get too hard (you know how chocolate does), because the peanut butter keeps it soft. And the powdered sugar is a sprinkle of fairy glitter on top. *Chef’s kiss*.
On the note of covering breakfast cereal in chocolate and powdered sugar, let us not forget all of the added vitamins and minerals! As a marketing push for mothers to justify giving their children something that otherwise has zero nutritional value, General Mills injected almost every vitamin and mineral a human could ever need into these tiny, woven squares of corn. So although, yes, puppy chow is not the beacon of health that your millenial green smoothie is, at least you’re getting your vitamins for the day. The peanut butter adds protein, so I’d say eating puppy chow is just as healthy as eating a cliff bar. And, by the way, it’s gluten free, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Maybe the fact that it’s essentially breakfast cereal is why our parents allowed us to eat as much of it as we liked. Puppy chow showed up at every birthday party, every church picnic, every sleepover. It was the treat that encouraged me to stand at the dessert table instead of zooming around the roller rink at my own birthday. Brownies got old, the sugar sickening my 8-year-old belly after too many. And how many pieces of cake does anyone really ever want to eat? Never more than 1.5, probably. But puppy chow? It’s tiny squares, and ‘just one more’ is the most miniscule of commitments. I only came up for air when the bowl was empty and my face was covered in mysterious white powder. Now that’s what I call a good party.
I’ve made puppy chow for my non-American friends who never had it growing up. They agree that it’s good, that it’s pretty moreish, but they don’t love it like I do, which leads me to the most important flavor that makes puppy chow taste so good: it tastes like nostalgia. Puppy chow is the first recipe I learned to make on my own, a lesson that I could provide for myself if I simply had the right ingredients. It tastes both like independence and like support: the dessert that never changes, no matter how many times I make it, the dessert that held my hand through adolescence and into adulthood, the dessert that reminded me in hard times I just needed the right ingredients. I made it in our college dorm’s tiny kitchen when I felt sad. After visiting my newly born niece in the US, I brought a box of corn Chex back to the UK just so I could cover it with chocolate and peanut butter. Puppy chow is my comfort in the ever-changing landscape of life. And I will continue to preach about the perfection of puppy chow until I get old. Please, make sure there is a bowl of puppy chow at my funeral.
It's not you, co. 