Home Made Protein Bars
So last week, after my disaster with fish and porridge, Zappoman pointed me in the direction of some more professionally designed recipes for protein bars. Keen to never again repeat my error, I followed his link over to Foodnetwork.com, and found the recipes from an episode of a programme called Good Eats.
So a trip to the local health foods shop later, I was ready. It’s a pretty easy recipe, although I had to think hard while putting the mixture together, as it uses US measures (what on earth’s a ‘cup’?), and I hadn’t got any cherries, so had to adjust the quantities for the other dried fruits as I went along.
The recipe basically breaks down to four stages
- Mix the dry ingredients together (soya protein, flour, etc)
- Chop up the dried fruit
- Mix the wet ingredients. The recipe says to do this in a big bowl, with a whisk. This started to get a bit messy, so I used a food processor instead.
- Mix 1, 2 & 3 together (picture below, left) & cook.
At the final mixing stage, I thought that the volume of apple juice that it calls for is a little light, so I added a little more to make it into more of a doughy consistency. And I increased the baking time by about 5 minutes to account for the fact that my dish was a little smaller than the one in the recipe, making my protein bars a little deeper.
The overall result is quite pleasant to eat - a little like bread pudding, like my grandmother used to make (and almost as solid too). She used to add all sorts of spices, like cinnamon and nutmeg to hers, as well as dark treacle (molasses) instead of sugar, which I think would go really well here too.
Anyway, here’s a photo of the finished product, as I was cutting it up. One piece seems to have fallen off the table though . . . 
If you’re interested in trying these, check out Foodnetwork.com. Alternatively, I’ve converted the recipe into metric measures, as well as changing its text layout to make it (I think) a little easier to follow. You can read this metric version of the recipe for protein bars here.
And finally, what are they like to eat while on the move - like, say, at 20 mph on the bike? Good enough to make Homer Simpson drool, and unlike some shop-bought protein bars I’ve tried, easier to swallow without getting that feeling that there’s something stuck in your thoat that needs washing down right now!
Overall rating: 8/10, with potential to go further by cooking them more like my grandmother would.
Awesome! Good to hear they worked out. I guess I need to try to make these now. I recall on the program they also listed all the nutritional stats, but for some reason they don’t include those in the recipe do they? All in all I recall them being pretty much exactly what you’re looking for from a macro-nutrient perspective.
If you’ve never seen Good Eats, check it out if you ever get a chance. It’s a pretty funny show. Basically the host treats all recipes like science experiments, and so he dives down into the details of the science behind why food does whatever it does. Sometimes this is from a nutritional perspective, and sometimes it’s just from a “why is that bubbling?” or “why is this hard and this soft?”. Anyway, it’s a good show.
Mmmmmmmyumyum…..
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