Brown Butter Rice Krispie Treats

Years and years ago, my mother indulged us and bought giant boxes of Rice Krispies and Corn Flakes to make all sorts of holiday treats. We brought out the green and red food coloring and made hideous stars, trees, and wreaths with the sticky goo, dotting every one liberally with red hots (because they look like tree ornaments) and staining the countertops along the way. I remember the wreaths in particular - made with dyed green cornflakes, they looked like little holly rings, but they didn't have enough structure to survive the hand-to-hand transfer that was inevitable with little mitts.

And while I look back at my early attempts to make holiday sweet tins affectionately, I can't imagine pulling out the food coloring or the red hots now. I look elsewhere for inspiration, gilding the lily in an entirely different way that speaks volumes about where I am in the kitchen and in my life.

Rice Krispie treats have 3 ingredients: butter, marshmallows and Rice Krispies. If you use unsalted butter, you should add salt - and that's it. Classic. And it's a slight variation on 2 of those ingredients that makes these just a little bit better. I use unsalted butter, and when melting the butter I push it all the way to brown butter stage - that nutty, warm flavor that comes from browned milk solids. Once there, I toss in the marshmallows and melt those too - just a little further than normal. They begin to brown and caramelize in the bottom of the pot, but no bother - keep scraping and stirring. You're getting nice buttery caramel bits that will stand out in the bars. Make sure you have your cereal and salt handy - they're going in next. I pour the cereal in and stir and scrape and stir and scrape until it's well coated and then...and here's where I go a little crazy...I toss in liberal pinches of Secret Stash Salt vanilla sea salt and stir some more.

In the whole mess goes to a well-buttered Pyrex dish (the last time I buttered it with Irish butter and thought I would die it tasted so good), and I use well-buttered hands to smoosh it all together. It rests for a few minutes on the counter before it's cut. Pushing the marshmallows to a near-caramel makes the whole mess a little more brittle, but once your teeth cut into a chunk of caramel, you'll realize it's worth the dirty pan.

One thing remains constant: the store-bought marshmallows. If you've ever tried to make Rice Krispie treats with homemade marshmallows, you know what I mean. I love homemade marshmallows, and I'd like nothing more than to use a batch of Irish Cream-spiked sticky stuff to hold it all together. But homemade marshmallows just don't firm up the way store-bought ones do, and you'll never get the crunchy bricks you'd expect. You can add the flavoring directly to the melted store-bought marshmallows to get the same effect, but skip the work of making your own - it doesn't work in my experience.

Brown Butter Rice Krispie Treats
5 T unsalted butter
1 bag large marshmallows
6 c Rice Krispie treats
1/2 tsp - 1 tsp Secret Stash Salt vanilla salt (to taste)

1. Grease a 9"x12" baking pan with butter (generously, salted butter if you choose)
2. In a stock pan or Dutch oven, slowly melt the remaining butter and cook it until it reaches brown butter stage.
3. Add the marshmallows to the pan and stir constantly, scraping the bottom of the pan to dislodge any stuck-on and caramelized bits. Cook until the marshmallows are completely melted and then cook a little bit more, until it starts to turn light brown.
4. Add the cereal all at once and stir vigorously until it is mostly coated with the cooked marshmallow cream.
5. Sprinkle half of the the salt into the cereal and continue stirring.
6. Scrape the cereal mixture into the prepared pan. If you haven't already done so, take a little bite of the cereal to test for salt. If it needs more sprinkle more over the top.
7. With greased hands, press the cereal mixture into the pan.
8. Allow it to rest until cooled, and then cut. Store in an airtight container.

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