Why It Works
- Chicken fat provides a welcome savory depth and richness to the sometimes-cloying classic version.
- Onion Soup Mix amplifies the onion flavor of the gribenes while adding a dose of umami.
- Toasting the cereal improves its texture and adds a nutty background flavor.
For many grade schoolers, a blue-foil–wrapped bar of sticky-sweet Rice Krispies Treats is a lunchbox treasure. But unfortunately for my parents, I was a bit more discerning (aka annoying) than most kids my age. When I was eight, for example, I cried because my parents wouldn’t let me order shrimp scampi at a restaurant. So the marshmallow snack they’d slip into my school lunch—never quite did it for my savory-seeking taste buds.
More recently, when I began to think about developing a recipe for my own High Holiday dessert, I had a devious idea of how to bend this bakesale staple into the saltier, more savory directions I crave. The key ingredient is a Jewish pantry staple: schmaltz.
Schmaltz is the Yiddish word for rendered poultry fat, most commonly chicken. The golden fat is packed with flavor and a warming richness that is the backbone of the best chicken soup and matzo balls. Many Jewish cooks wisely add diced onions partway through rendering to impart a subtle caramelly sweetness to the fat, which I was confident would act as the perfect bridge between the salty and sweet flavors here.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
Finally, and maybe most importantly, after making and straining the schmaltz using this basic method, you are left with the strained crispy chicken skin and onions, called gribenes in Yiddish. And though it may cause a few bubbes to clutch their pearls, I was all too excited to fold those cracklings into the cereal mixture.
After testing a bunch of other mix-ins in the hopes that I could pack in even more comforting flavors of a Rosh Hashanah roast, I settled on adding another big part of Jewish-American culinary culture: Lipton Onion Soup Mix, often lovingly called « Jewish MSG. » Ashkenazi cooks like my grandma tear open the paper packet of brown-gray powder and dried onion to use in everything from a dry rub for brisket to casseroles and, of course, soup.
The slightly artificial, capital-O onion flavor from the mix helps to multiply the allium flavor and richness from the fried onions in the schmaltz. That flavor amplification is also in no small part due to the ample amount of actual MSG the mix contains.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
For extra credit, and since you’ll have some time to kill while you wait for the schmaltz to render, I call for you to toast the Rice Krispies in the oven, greatly improving their texture when folded with the melty marshmallows and adding some welcome nuttiness to this more complex flavor profile. All of this effort results in what may just be the platonic ideal of a salty-meets-sweet treat.
Also! Should you desire to take this dessert even further, you can add some other things inspired by Jewish classics. In my tests, I was particularly partial to mixing in some everything bagel seasoning or minced dried apricots. One of them drives the treats even farther into savory territory, the other nudges it more towards sweet—you know your preferences so go with whichever sounds best to you.
Serious Eats / Amanda Suarez
