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 How is Cereal Made?

How is Cereal Made?
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 6 to 8
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   7.66

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    cooker, nutritious, flavoring, novelty, heated, edible, multicolored, method, especially, final, pressure, difficult, flatten, between, simply, toasted
     content words:    Apple Jacks, Frosted Flakes, Honey Nut Cheerios, Berry Burst Cheerios

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How is Cereal Made?
By Sharon Fabian 		  
1     The word cereal means edible grains. Cereal includes everything from a grain of wheat right off the stalk to a bowl of multicolored, processed, and puffed shapes with marshmallows added.
 
2     Wheat, rice, and corn are common cereal grains. All of these can be prepared many different ways to make breakfast cereal.
 
3     Oatmeal is an example of the simplest and most nutritious kind of breakfast cereal. Old-fashioned oatmeal, the kind that you cook for five minutes before eating, is simply rolled oats. Oat grains are steamed to soften them; then they are rolled flat. That's it. Quick cooking oats, the one-minute kind, are cut into small pieces before they are rolled. Instant oatmeal - the kind you add hot water to and it's ready to eat - is precooked.
 
4     Getting a little more complicated and a little less nutritious, we have flake cereals like corn flakes and raisin bran. Corn flakes, raisin bran, and other processed cereals have more than one ingredient. The ingredients listed on a box of corn flakes include corn, sugar, corn syrup, flavoring, salt, and vitamins. There are more steps to making corn flakes, too. First, corn grits are cooked in a pressure cooker to soften. Then they are piped into hot air dryers. Next, the grits pass between large rollers to flatten them. In the next step, they are toasted as they pass quickly through a huge oven. Finally, vitamins and minerals are sprayed on the flakes.
 
5     Some cereal grains are mixed into a batter before they are processed and cooked. This method produces puffed cereals like Cheerios, which is made from oats and other ingredients, and Kix, which is made from corn and other ingredients.

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