by This recipe uses two of the One Chip Challenge chips to deliver a fiery take on the familiar snack mix.
Ingredients
4 Cups Corn Chex
4 Cups Wheat Chex
2 Cups Pretzels
2 Cups Cheese Crackers
1 Cup Peanuts
2 One-Chip Challenge Chips, Crushed (or 2 Dried Ghost Peppers, Crushed)
3 Tablespoons Butter
2 Tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 to 3 Tablespoons Louisiana Hot Sauce
1 Tablespoon Seasoned Salt
1 Teaspoon Garlic Powder
Directions
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Add all the dry ingredients to a large, microwave safe bowl and stir together. Melt the butter then mix with the wet ingredients and the seasonings. Pour one third of that mix over the dry ingredients and stir well. Repeat until the mixture fully coats the dry ingredients.
Place the bowl in the microwave and heat on high for two minutes. Stir then repeat two to three more times until the mix is mostly dry. Lay out on a cookie sheet on top of the warm oven (not inside) and allow the mix to settle and dry for about thirty minutes.
Note that I am following pretty closely to the Chex Snack Mix recipe, but feel free to mix things up however you like. If I don’t use the Chex cereal, I will substitute some sort of cracker that will do a good job of absorbing the flavoring like broken up Triscuits. I always add some sort of pretzels, cheese crackers, and nuts to the mix, but beyond that it often depends on what is in the pantry. Those broken up tortilla chips at the bottom of the bag are good to add as are the remnants of a bag of pita chips. Cheetos are good in the mix as well, and I have thrown in some Fritos from time to time also.
Since the One-Chip Challenge chips are hard to find (unless you buy their apparent replacement from India), feel free to crush up a dried ghost pepper or scorpion chili or two and add those to the mix. Following the directions above, this went above Fiery on my scale, but not quite to the Insane level. But as I was eating the mix, my whole mouth felt the heat and my lips would be burning, so this is not something that you will be serving to average mortals.
The story of why I did this mix goes back to 2021 when I bought four of that year’s One-Chip Challenge chips that Paqui was selling. Me and four other friends planned on getting together to do the challenge, but that got delayed and sadly one of the people involved passed away unexpectedly. It put a damper on the whole challenge and the chips sat in the back of my pantry for the next few years. I couldn’t bring myself to throw them out, but I just wasn’t interested in trying them out by myself either. I thought about selling them on Ebay, but wasn’t sure if they would allow it after the one kid died in 2023 after eating that year’s version.
So this January came around and my wife was fussing at me to get them out of the pantry. That’s when I came up with the idea of the Inferno Snack Mix. I originally planned on adding all four, but after tasting a piece of one of the chips, I decided to scale back. It was about a fifth of a chip and that was well beyond the Insane level on my scale (it was also a little stale after four years). I crushed up the rest of that and one full chip and made the snack mix, and now I have the last two chips to do one more recipe. I rather like how it turned out, so after the Paqui chips are gone, I will try it with two ghost peppers and I will report back on that.
