Cheetos Flame Test

Will Cheetos Burn? 

Why yes, yes they do. They burn quite well, actually. If you ever have to start a fire with only one match, light a Cheeto first. 

We wanted to get an idea if being flammable was only a property of Cheetos, so we tried burning several other types of chips.

We started by burning Cheetos Puffs.

We burned Crispy Cheetos.

We burned Fritos.

We even burned Doritos - about all of the "itos" we could find.

We had a few observations.

1. While all of the chips burned well, the Doritos burned the best. We think this is because the chips are bigger, and there is a greater surface area to mass ratio.

2. The Crispy Cheetos were the hardest to light on fire. They have the lowest surface area to mass ratio of the chips we burned.

3. There was a yellowish liquid that dripped from all of the chips except the Cheetos Puffs. We weren't sure what it was until we washed cookie sheet we were using as a fire pan, and discovered it to be oil. We think the fire melted the oil, and it was able to drop out of the chip before the fire consumed it.

Finally, we wanted to utilize our new found knowlege. We decided to have a camp fire and roast hot dogs for dinner.

Quite a fire from just a few Cheetos Puffs, plenty to roast the hot dogs. Once the fire was going we noticed that even the Cheetos Puffs were exuding oil. We thought that perhaps the texture of the puffs makes it harder for the oil to excape, so it takes a larger fire.

This was a fun experiment. We learned you can eat your Cheetos and cook with them too!