Weetabix ice cream and Crunchy Nut chicken: why Londoners are eating cereal for lunch and dinner - not just breakfast

It is one of the clearer tribal divides — people who get cereal and people who just get angry about it. A normally rational friend becomes uncharacteristically riled up when cornflakes are mentioned.

“Cereal is the one food I don’t understand,” says this hater. “It is a waste of milk and an example of the power of capitalist marketing.”

But recently I managed to hoodwink him into a volte-face: after he had polished off a bowl of ice cream and pronounced it the best of the year so far, I revealed the secret ingredient — Shredded Wheat. It gave the dessert texture and malty depth.

The UK cereal market is worth £1.6 billion and it features in 65 per cent of weekday breakfasts, according to shakeupyourwakeup.com, the place to go if you are into cereal facts.

Its versatility extends beyond breakfast: at London restaurants and street food stalls it has made it into desserts and even the savoury zone, in a triumphant riposte to those who say cereal is not an acceptable dinner.

“Lots of people don’t think outside the cereal box,” says Alan Keery, co-founder of Brick Lane’s Cereal Killer café. He has a cookbook out in October where all the recipes involve one key ingredient — cereal. He explains: “It is just a grain, so there is a lot of scope for cooking with it — sweet, savoury, in drinks, mixing cereals.

“Last year we realised the potential — we were cooking and wondered what it would be like if we added Weetabix.”

Keery is considering broadening the menu at his café. It already has a strong line in baked goods — Lucky Charms cheesecake, Coco Pops brownies and banoffee crisp, made with Toffee Crisp cereal.

Meanwhile, my ice cream dish was inspired by DJ-turned-chef Carl Clarke, who serves a superior Weetabix soft-serve at his new restaurant Chick ’n’ Sours in Dalston.

“It’s malty in flavour and comforting,” says Clarke. “Everyone’s got their favourite cereal moment, whether it’s the soft Weetabix once the milk has soaked in or, better still, the milk itself after the Weetabix has been eaten. Once you’ve made the ice cream you can do anything with it. Sprinkle it with some smashed Weetabix and muscovado sugar and you’ve got a bowl of Weetabix in an ice cream tub.

“Make a shake from the soft-serve and you’ve got your favourite bit of the Weetabix experience: the thick creamy milk.”

On the savoury spectrum, Breddos Tacos uses Crunchy Nut cereal to give the meat in its dishes extra pizzazz.

They say: “The inspiration for the tacos came from looking for extra crunch for our chicken. We messed around with lots of alternatives using flours, seeds and grains, but ultimately cereal fried up better and delivered the biggest crunch.”

Breddos is also branching out with a new dish at Street Feast Hawker House — oat-crusted lamb sweetbreads.

Chefs are onto it. Jack Monroe makes porridge pancakes and Heston Blumenthal is also in the breakfast bunch but typically subversive about it. At The Fat Duck he uses parsnips to make cereal, with parsnip milk.

He says: “Tasting the milk after the parsnips were cooked, I was catapulted back to childhood and the memory of the milk left at the bottom of a bowl of cereal.”

If you have cereal for lunch, dinner and dessert, it does beg the question — what do you have for breakfast?