Similar to the fabled cinnamon challenge, the saltine cracker challenge is a food challenge in which people are tasked with eating six saltine crackers in one minute without drinking any water. It's been around since at least the 1990s, if not earlier, and is now featured in lots of videos on the internet thanks to the rise of sites like YouTube. Disclaimer: We don't necessarily recommend trying this at home. Let's take a closer look at the challenge, and the snack crackers behind it.
What Are Saltine Crackers?
Saltine crackers are square soda crackers usually made from white flour, yeast, and baking soda. They tend to be very dry and crisp, and sometimes have salt or even sea salt on them — hence the challenge behind eating so many without water.
Nabisco and Kellogg's are two brands that make the crackers. There are premium original saltine crackers, unsalted tops saltine crackers, and even whole grain saltines as well as gluten-free varieties of the snacks.
They can be eaten with peanut butter, cheese, and other toppings, and are sometimes used in cooking. Saltine crackers can be crumbled into salads, stews, soups, and more, and can be baked into or spread over casseroles. These are a little blander than Keebler's Club Crackers or Ritz Crackers, which contain olive oil, palm oil, or canola oil depending on the variety. They're very similar to Oyster Crackers in taste, though the size and shape are obviously different.
What's in Saltine Crackers?
Nabisco's premium saltine crackers are made with unbleached enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate (Vitamin B1) riboflavin (Vitamin B2), folic acid), soybean oil, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, sea salt, malted barley flour, baking soda, and yeast. It's safe to say that crackers from most other brands are similar. You can grab a serving size of most of these from Amazon or the grocery store, depending on how lazy you are.
Nabisco's brand contains no cholesterol, no dietary fiber, no trans fat, and no saturated fat. They also don't have much in the way of calcium, carbohydrates, potassium, or total fat. It's easy to see how they can be easily added to recipes because they don't change the nutritional value very much, unless you ate an entire pack of family-size saltine crackers or something, which we wouldn't recommend.
What's the Saltine Cracker Challenge About?
The saltine cracker challenge seems to be very simple: eat six of the crackers in under a minute without drinking water. Because the crackers are so dry and salty, they exhaust the saliva in a person's mouth quickly, making the challenge rather difficult to complete.
It's both an individual challenge that people have taken on in everything from morning talk shows to YouTube, and there's even a saltine cracker challenge in North Dakota every year where contestants have to eat four saltines and then whistle.
Do you think you could win the challenge?
