This is my recipe for chewy, calorie dense, high protein food bars (they're like concentrated Clif Bars). These are good for camping or for refueling on really long bike rides. This recipe yields 8-10 bars that have about 500 Calories and 23 g of protein each. The ingredients for one batch cost less than $10, about half as much as an equivalent amount of Clif Bars.
Ingredients
- 2 cups oatmeal
- 1 cup ground flax seed
- 1 cup protein powder (I use unflavored whey extract. Flavored powder works too)
- 1 cup crunchy peanut butter
- 1 cup honey
Instructions
-
Put everything in a mixing bowl.
-
Mix everything by hand. I guess you could use a mixer instead but that'd be way harder to clean.
-
Mix thoroughly, you don't want any dry powdery patches.
-
Wash your hands and then make the bars. At this point the bars are remarkably unsticky; the dry ingredients have mostly absorbed the sticky ingredients. Make 8-12 bars, it's really easy to accidentally make the bars way too big. You can make smaller bars if you'd prefer snack sized portions. Smoosh the bars together well, the bars will break apart if they have seams in them.
-
Let the bars air out overnight so that the oatmeal soaks up the stickiness and the excess moisture evaporates.
Adjustments
This recipe is adaptable, you can add fruit or nuts or anything else you want. When you experiment try to maintain the ratio of sticky and absorbent ingredients so that the bars aren't crumbly or gooey. Also if you add too many chunky ingredients the bars will fall apart.
Approximate Nutrition Facts
This is highly variable depending on your ingredients and how big your bars are. I made nine bars and used salt-free peanut butter for instance.
