No-Sugar Energy Bars: Summary, Collected Links and Specific Comments

No-Sugar Energy Bars - Summary, Collected Links and Specific Comments

How's everyone doing with this end-of-week? I hope I haven't been too much of a downer this week - it's been a tough one! 

I had my first two mercury fillings out on Friday: the dentist was awesome and I feel very good about it, but obviously it's a pretty exhausting thing to go through, and then I tweaked my vitamin C IV at the naturopath's and it hurt more than it needed to… It's quite an adventure!

Today, I wanted to provide a post with links to all the posts that I've made about no-sugar energy bars, so that you could get at all of them in one go. I also wanted to make a few specific comments about ingredients.

The naturopath has told me that I should be eating 1/2 a cup of coconut oil a day!!! I know he's right, especially in the heavy-metals-detoxing situation, but it's hard for me to do. So I'm probably going to be trying to eat more of the 'fudge' (the recipe for which I'll link here too: I made my second batch of it with mostly coconut oil and just a little cacao butter instead of equal amounts of each) instead of energy bars.

Here are all the links, then:

Part 1 Preliminary

Part 2 Palette of Ingredients - first recipe

Part 3 Intermission - 'Palate' Considerations

Part 4 - My Magic Ingredient - recipe

Part 5 - My Special Technique

My Celebratory Fudge

And here are a few specific thoughts about ingredients and techniques:

Remember - basic ingredients are nuts and seeds (including shredded coconut), 'chia sweet,' coconut oil and sometimes cacao butter, protein powders and nut milk pulps, superfoods, spices, high quality salt.

When you use hemp protein/fiber powder in a recipe, you will want to use more spice than usual: for some reason, this ingredient can create a very bland-tasting end product if you don't up the spices. The same goes for flaxseed or if you happen to use psyllium - but it seems to go for the hemp more than anything else. 

I'm not sure why this is, since if you use whole hemp seeds you have to be careful the opposite way: they have such a strong flavor, you have to balance it carefully. Coconut complements that hemp flavor very well, and lemon zest, cayenne and cinnamon are ok, but cardamom and rose water and mint - some of my very favorites - don't go well with hemp.

Nut milk pulp is a great ingredient for extending, and making things that are not too rich. Make sure it's fully dry before you use it in an energy bar. You can crumble it with your hands to make sure it's not too clumped: it's not really necessary to sift or vitamix it for this purpose so long as you mix it in well.

Play with the thickness of the 'chia sweet:' generally, thick is good (remember, it's replacing honey/agave/date paste-type textures). Also, if the liquid part of the chia gel includes a flavoring (like an herbal tea) besides the stevia, make sure that it's a strong infusion to ensure that the flavor comes out.

Pressing is a very good technique for enhancing the texture of the bar. But unless you keep them in the freezer, my bottom line is that it's probably advantageous to dry them a little if you need them to last for a long time, take them camping, etc.

Have fun and enjoy!

About No-Sugar Treats 3: My 'Magic Ingredient'

Thanks for bearing with me for that soul-baring interlude! I'm ready to share more about making raw energy bars without any sugar ingredients, which means, to recap the last post, without the easeful advantages of the sweetening, binding and preserving effects that dried fruit, honey and other syrups, and the like, provide. I hope you're also on board with me on the 'palate' aspect: if we choose to look at it as opening ourselves up to a spectrum of flavors that get refined out of ken by over-reliance on sweet, rather than as being deprived of the super-sweet, the adventure is even more joyful.

Well, so - back to my metaphors and substitutions philosophy… I am wanting to make a portable, delicious, energy-bar-type snack that holds together well and doesn't spoil too quickly. I love the adventure of infusing flavors… What could I find as a substitute? 

The magic ingredient that I came up with is actually composed of three magic ingredients that are already widely loved: I call it 'chia-sweet' - chia seeds*, white stevia powder and tea or other infused liquid! I realized that if I make a thick chia gel from chia seeds mixed with a stevia sweetened strong herbal tea, or water with stevia and a strong essence, I end up with a sweet ingredient that is also a binder: it's not sticky and waterless like honey or dates, but it's about as close as you can get without sugar! It's also versatile and variable in terms of thickness and flavor combinations. And it can work great as a substitute for sweeteners if you're adapting a regular recipe.

So, it has two of the sweet things' properties out of three going for it: sweetness and binding. What about the third, durability? - since it inevitably adds some water... I'm still working on this, and don't have a definitive answer yet, except to note that the time when I kept the fat content very low, as I mentioned before, it molded fast, so keeping a decent amount of fat in the recipe is essential. A good trick with this 'chia-sweet' ingredient is to include some flax meal, or some chia meal, in the dry ingredients. This will absorb the water further and may help to make it last. But as I said, this is something I'm still working on.

Here are some ratios to play around with: 1/2c chia to 1 1/2c liquid makes a thicker gel than commonly used just for chia smoothies, etc, so I often start from there as a guideline and scale up or down depending on how much volume I'm needing. It should be stir-able but there shouldn't be any 'loose' liquid there. As for the stevia and extracts, a teaspoon of pure white stevia is equivalent to a cup of sugar (or honey, or dates). Since I've often started from regular recipes that do contain dates/agave/honey/etc, I will decide how much sweetening I need and then add stevia accordingly. For example, if a recipe has 1/4c agave in it as the only sweetener, I'd use 1/4 teaspoon stevia. But if it also had dried fruit, I'd either put more, or up the cinnamon and ginger to complexify the sweetness.

Some of the 'flavorings' that I love to use in the liquid are: 

- a strong chai tea

- a strong peppermint tea and/or some peppermint extract

- almond extract 

- rose water with cardamom (my middle-eastern roots asserting themselves - I adore this!)

As an example recipe, the 'bliss ball' recipe I posted last time is also greatly improved by using 'chia-sweet.' This version of the 'bliss balls' really came out as a pretty convincing 'energy bar'-type texture, actually, although it's superfood-heavy, green, and looks good in balls!

1 1/2 c filberts (soaked and dried)

1/2 c brazil nuts (soaked and dried)

1/2 c shredded coconut

1/2 c hemp protein-fiber powder

1 T spirulina 

1 T maca

lemon zest

dried hot pepper

pinch sea salt

cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, ginger, black pepper, turmeric (yes, I'm spice-crazy!)

1/2 c 'chia-sweet' made with a 1:3 chia-liquid ratio, with 1/2t stevia and strong chai tea (chia-chai - tee hee)

1/4 c coconut oil (melted)

extra cinnamon (or what you will) for rolling

Grind the nuts, dried pepper, lemon zest, as fine as your equipment can manage, and mix all the dry ingredients in a bowl. Gradually incorporate the 'chia-sweet' alternately with the coconut oil. I always end up having to do the final mixing with my hands: don't be tempted to add more liquid before you've really incorporated as much as you can so that it holds together, you'll often be surprised at how little 'wet' it takes to get it all blended. Adding the coconut oil alternately with the 'chia-sweet' helps to avoid ending up with too much liquid in there. Roll in balls or shape in bars and coat with cinnamon if desired.

Oh, I love this! It's so good! It is so satiating on all sorts of levels. The maca was a great addition, as I'd suspected it would be. Note that I only added one more tablespoon of coconut oil compared to the last time. Durability-wise, definitely store quantities in the freezer and at least in the fridge.

Additional note: remembering metaphors and substitutes again, these recipes are totally 'templates:' it's easy to vary the nuts and seeds used (and I'll probably write sometime about the different virtues of each), as well as nut pulp from making mylks, superfood powders, protein powders, and spices. Probably not everyone likes as much of a spice explosion as I do :) And I, too, love to highlight individual spices on occasion. That's something else I'd love to talk about sometime - the different magics and properties of individual spices and their synergistic combinations.

So, 'chia-sweet' is my magic ingredient for holding energy bars together. I have also learned a really beneficial technique that seems to make the texture even better, and that will be the subject for the final post on the subject.

*When I started to participate in the raw food world again after my absence, the prevalence of chia was one of the little signs from the cosmos of how I was still connected: they'd been one of my favorite staples for quite some time. It was so sweet to see other people enjoying them in ways similar to myself. Here are some other good discussions of chia. This lovely article by Angela Stokes-Monarch is a comprehensive overview. Joanna just posted some luscious recipes and highlighted the high calcium content that is one of chia's many desirable features. The Pure 2 Raw ladies have pictures of their great creations featuring chia. Yes, chia is wonderful!