A video recently surfaced on the internet asking a question no one wanted. "We have cereal milk, nut milk, coconut milk: Why not Cheetos milk?" Why not indeed? Well of course, besides the obvious answer of “Because it goes against the laws of nature.”
But does it? The recipe, first brought to our attention by Hello Giggles, comes to us from Pepper, a food site out of the Phillipines. It's explained in the original post that Cheetos are made from corn, a base in many cereals. As for the cheese, well, wasn’t it milk once upon a time? (Or, in the case of cheese powder, it was milk once upon a time a long, long time ago).
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Logic only goes so far, however, when the collective unconscious instinctively recoils at the very idea of something. And, for whatever reason, milk combined with savory things (looking at you, pizza) will always fill us with terror.
This is a fact I can independently confirm, since I decided to make the weird concoction this afternoon to try it for myself. As it turns out, if you pour milk into a cup of Cheetos in front of your coworkers, people may actually flee the scene.
Following the recipe, I then let the Cheetos and milk cup “set” for 20 minutes, strained ands sampled. I did skip one of Pepper’s steps: toasting the Cheetos first to develop the corn flavor. We don’t have a toaster oven in the office, but I felt fine about this choice since Cheetos milk is made-up and I can do whatever I want.
After 20 minutes, I poured the newly-infused milk into a new cup. I was first blown away by its color — a kind of sherbert-y pastel that feels like the orange cousin to millennial pink.
Then it came time to try it. My editor offered me a spit cup, but I’ve eaten everything from duck testicles to Kylie Jenner’s sweet potato casserole. So I put on a brave face and took a sip and was shocked to taste… not much of anything.
So I took a second sip. Then I tasted corn. A third sip — more corn. But no real hints of cheese. I convinced my editor to try a sip, and she didn’t taste cheese, either. It really did taste like a sort of savory cereal milk, which wasn’t really bad, it was just deeply weird. Like there was nothing unpleasant, per se, about taking little sips of it, but, in the back of my mind I kept thinking, “Cheetos milk! Cheetos milk!”
So while I can’t imagine Cheetos milk is going to take the world by storm any time soon, it’s also not nearly as horrific as I imagined. Which isn’t much in terms of endorsements, but, then again, I could be wrong. I hated midi-length dresses and truffle oil when they first became popular, and now I own (and enjoy) both. So who knows, maybe in a few years we’ll all be enjoying Cheetos milk ice cream. Just remember my words of (somewhat) comfort: it’s not as bad as it sounds. Mostly.