For no reason other than "we just wanted to look into this," let's get into what those beloved Lucky Charms marshmallows actually are and how they compare to what we consider to be textbook marshmallows. You know, like Kraft Jet-Puffed marshmallows or the ones that end up in your Swiss Miss hot chocolate.
That begs the question: What is a marshmallow? For simplicity's sake, let's say it's an always sweet, sometimes airy whipped combination of water, sugar, gelatin, and sometimes eggs. If you adjust the quantity of any of those ingredients, you can create a harder or squishier mallow.
Sooooo, if, per a box of the cereal, Lucky Charms' marshmallows are made of “sugar, modified corn starch, corn syrup, dextrose, gelatin, calcium carbonate, yellows 5&6, blue 1, red 40, and artificial flavor,” does that mean you've not been eating real marshmallows the whole time? They are significantly crunchier than the ones that come bagged from a grocery story, after all.
The ingredients pretty much match up. Kraft's classic little guys are made of corn syrup, sugar, modified cornstarch, dextrose, water, gelatin, a "whipping aid," natural and artificial flavor, and blue 1" meaning there's an overlap with just about everything but water and whipping aid.
...That checks out as Lucky Charms marshmallows are flatter and more concentrated than Kraft's. The discrepancy in ingredients doesn't disqualify Lucky Charms's sugary bits as marshmallows, though. Pastry chef Alex Levin told Yahoo! back in 2014 the cereal ones are "made to be a candy, really."
He continued: "For instance, Lucky Charms uses a method of making marshmallows that minimizes the amount of water. That makes it so shelf-stable that you could have a marshmallow that lasts over a year."
And that concludes this very serious and important deep dive. Marshmallows are marshmallows. Everything is a marshmallow. Marshmallows, yay!
