Oven Baked Chex Mix
One last nibble before I leave you to enjoy your holiday. I definitely have a salt tooth. Its easy for me to avoid the candies and fudge and truffles of the season. Its the spinach dip, cheese snaps, and crisp roasted turkey skin that I can’t control myself around. I guess I could call it a fat tooth! Since you get one month a year to really blow your diet, this is the party mix your guests will reach for when they’re sick of all the sugar.
You keep your bacon grease in a jar in the fridge, right? If you don’t you should-it adds tons of flavor to your regular dishes. Just cook your bacon, strain the fat into a glass jar and refrigerate. Of course, you can use all butter for this if you really must.
Oven Baked Chex Mix
makes 12 cups, prep 5 min, cook 1 hour
- 3 tbsp bacon grease
- 3 tbsp butter
- 1/2 cup Worcestershire sauce
- 1 tsp dry mustard
- 2 tsp garlic powder
- 1/2 tsp onion powder
- 1/2 tsp hot sauce (like Tabasco)
- salt to taste
- 9 cups Chex cereal (in combination, such as 3 cups corn, 3 cups rice, and/or 3 cups wheat)
- 1 cup small pretzels
- 1 cup broken garlic bagel chips
- 1 cup mixed nuts (optional)
- Preheat oven to 250°F. Place butter and bacon grease in a large roasting pan and place in the oven to melt. You can also melt butter and bacon grease in a small saucepan.
- Once butter and grease are melted, whisk in Worcestershire, mustard, garlic, onion, and hot sauce. Taste and salt to desired amount. I used unsalted butter and about 2 tsps of Kosher salt. You can also sub ranch dressing mix for the spices if you want ranch chex mix.
- If using a sauce pan, pour mixture into a roasting pan.
- Quickly add cereal, pretzels, bagel chips, and nuts to the pan and toss to coat as evenly as possible.
- Place roaster into the oven and bake for about 1 hour, stirring thoroughly every 15 minutes.
If you are looking for more holiday recipes check out this post here from Thanksgiving, it lists most of our tried and true holiday recipes. I hope you get some rest and quality time with family and friends. See you next year!
Posted in Easy, Snacks/Appetizers
December 22nd, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Oh I hear ya, I’m a salt tooth too. No problem around cookies, but give me your entire spinach dip (yours rocks, by the way) and I could demolish it myself.
December 22nd, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Next time try adding Cheerios and seasoning salt – after it is cooked toss in some BBQ peanuts too.
Ans it gets better as it ages – we used to make it 2 wks b4 Xmas and store int he fridge in zip top bags.
December 23rd, 2009 at 7:24 am
Oh man, I haven’t had homemade Chex Mix in forever. This is outstanding. A bowl of this and a bowl of the Chex covered in chocolate and powdered sugar and I’m in guilt-laden heaven.
December 25th, 2009 at 3:42 am
Yum! I just had an unusual variation on this tonight – didn’t have all the pretzels, nuts, bagel chips, etc, so it was just Chex mix, and used some brown sugar for a sweeter (rather than salty) taste. It turned out well.
But I have a sweet tooth rather than a salty tooth, so maybe I’m biased! 😛
December 27th, 2009 at 9:32 pm
I’ve never made homemade Chex Mix, but love it. This recipe looks wonderful.
December 29th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
What a delicious mixed treat. Oven baked, too .. must try it that way!
January 1st, 2010 at 10:20 am
Hi Katie – I laughed right out loud at your description of the saved bacon fat in your fridge. It made me nostalgic, except for one difference.
I grew up in a Ukrainian family (our basic food groups: butter, sour cream and bacon) where we always had an old green coffee mug sitting beside the kitchen sink, into which we would pour the morning’s bacon grease to sit and congeal.
During the day, we would dip into the bacon fat to fry up onions or anything else that needed frying for lunch or dinner.
That coffee cup NEVER went into the fridge! It would just get topped up regularly and used regularly. Who knows what the very bottom of that green coffee cup held? Eeee-yuck….
It’s a wonder all seven of us survived!
Alas, since my heart attack last year, my days of storing bacon fat (in the fridge or elsewhere) are long gone. My culinary efforts now lean to adapting my favourite old family recipes into new ‘heart-smart’ ones that are low-salt, low-fat and high-fibre.
My Ukrainian Baba would be spinning in her grave at all this healthy eating!
July 24th, 2013 at 4:15 pm
For those of us who don’t cook bacon to use that amazing “liquid gold” bacon drippings, you can always use Granny’s Good Ol’ Fashion Bacon Drippings! Party Mix is amazing with bacon drippings. I use taco seasoning to give it a kick!