FOOD & NUTRITION
Adventures in Baking
By Amy Braden
Energy bars are ridiculously convenient—what other foodstuff can you
toss in your gym bag next to your sneakers, sit on, forget about for six
months, rediscover and eat without thinking twice? There may be others,
but the list has to be short. With so many varieties on the market these
days and so little effort required to get them, why bother making your
own? There are plenty of good reasons:
• You want to save money.
• You want to avoid eating high fructose corn syrup (ingredient #1 or 2
of most bars), preservatives, and weird stuff at the end of the label you
can’t pronounce.
• You want to do something nice for your athletic friend/significant
other/family member, but their restrictive diet and training regimen
rules out normal baked goods.
• Your editor assigned you an article to write about it.
OK, so maybe that last one’s a bit of a stretch for everyone but me. But
there’s still one more good reason to strap on that apron: total control.
Since there are so many vegans, vegetarians, locavores, greens and
wannabe gourmets clogging the market aisles these days, the act of eating
has become as much about politics as it is about nutrition. Making
your own bars gives you one more way to eat your ideals—since you’re
buying the raw materials, they can be 100% organic, 100% fair trade,
100% sustainably harvested, 100% dryer lint—whatever it is that turns
you on. Personally, I try to buy as much of my grocery list from the
Amish as possible, and purchased my honey and peanut butter from a
very nice bearded gentleman at Reading Terminal Market, elbowing as
few tourists as possible in the process.
I’d love to be able to say I spent months in the Liberty Sports Magazine
test kitchen refining this recipe or that 9 out of 10 athletes found it
enhanced their power output by 40%, but the truth is that I found it
online at racedaynutrition.com. There are a surprising number of recipes
for energy bars all over the Internet, and something I noticed while conducting research for this article was that most of the people writing them
don’t necessarily have athletic performance in mind. I selected three for
our office taste test based on the criteria that the ingredient list did not
contain mini-marshmallows, corn syrup or butter, and this one was the
clear favorite—even beating out Alton Brown’s Protein Bars from the
Food Network (which incidentally were spit out by one tester, garnering
the comment “would not eat”). These are very similar in appearance and
taste to Peanut Butter PowerBars, will keep in the refrigerator for weeks,
and require no skill to prepare beyond the ability to hold a spatula.
24 LIBERTY SPORTS MAGAZINE APRIL 2008
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No-Bake ‘Ems Source: Phil Ethridge
Ingredients
• 1 cup oat bran
• ½ cup toasted sunflower seeds, ground using
food processor
• ½ cup skim (or soy) milk powder
• ½ cup raisins
• 2 tablespoons cocoa (or carob powder)
• ½ cup cooked brown rice, minced using
food processor
• ½ cup all-natural peanut butter
• ½ cup honey
The Jelly Belly Professional Cycling Team’s Chiropractor
1. In a large bowl, combine oat bran, sunflower, milk powder, raisins and cocoa.
2. Add the brown rice, peanut butter and honey, 1 at a time, combining after each addition until
all ingredients are thoroughly mixed. By the time you get to the honey, this takes some perseverance and serious upper body strength. The mixture is so dense, I actually tried taking it out of
the bowl and kneading it like bread on a cutting board. Do NOT try this—the honey makes it
too sticky and you’ll just end up making a big mess before putting it back in the bowl.
3. Press the mixture into any available pan to your desired thickness. I used an 8x8 Pyrex, but
you should use something bigger if you want to end up with bars that are the same size and
shape as the prepackaged ones. Once you get the pan into the fridge the dough is not going to
spread, so press it down to the size you want the finished product to be.
4. Refrigerate until firm (about 2 hrs.), then slice. Makes about 16 servings. ▲
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215.922.6333
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APRIL 2008 LIBERTY SPORTS MAGAZINE 25