Chances are you’ve tried (or at least heard of) Spring Energy Products. They offer real food based products that many runners enjoy, including myself. Cannaberry has been my staple for some time, but I’m really excited about their relatively new Awesome Sauce flavor. In his recent member highlight, Kelly Barber raves about Speed Nut. The only thing I am not excited about is the price tag, especially because everything that is listed in the ingredients is something that I have in my pantry. Shouldn’t I be able to make this stuff at home and save a lot of money? I started the project this spring, and have been quite happy with the results. I’m offering my recipe for the “Awesome Sauce” flavor for the DPMR Recipe of the Month
Ingredients:
- 1 cup yam/sweet potato, peeled and cut into small dices
- ¾ cup basmati rice or sushi rice
- 1 tsp salt
- 2 tsp cinnamon
- 1 tsp minced ginger (I use Ginger People’s Minced Ginger in a jar for ease or when I don’t have the real stuff), optional
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 2 cups water
- 1 cup apple juice
- 1 cup pecan halves
- 1 cup applesauce (plain, cinnamon, or mixed berry is fine!)
- ½ cup maple syrup
Directions:
Cook ingredients #1 through 8 in a rice cooker. Once cooked, process pecans in a food processor until fine. Add applesauce to the food processor and process until smooth. Add cooked rice mixture and maple syrup and process until smooth.
Easy, right? The delivery system is the tricky part. I like to put the puree into my son’s reusable food pouches. This is a resealable and reusable option that is also environmentally friendly, but they are relatively heavy, might be more than you are looking for on a short run, and don’t fit in small pockets. Small silicone bottles are another option. You can also put it into a plastic ziploc bag and cut/rip the corner off to squeeze it into your mouth, but there is a higher risk of breakage!
| Nutrition Facts | |
|---|---|
| Servings: makes 34.0 ounces | |
| Amount Per 1 ounce Serving | |
| calories 62 | |
| % Daily Value * | |
| Total Fat 3 g | 4 % |
| Saturated Fat 0 g | 1 % |
| Monounsaturated Fat 0 g | |
| Polyunsaturated Fat 0 g | |
| Trans Fat 0 g | |
| Cholesterol 0 mg | 0 % |
| Sodium 73 mg | 3 % |
| Potassium 36 mg | 1 % |
| Total Carbohydrate 9 g | 3 % |
| Dietary Fiber 1 g | 2 % |
| Sugars 5 g | |
| Protein 1 g | 1 % |
| Vitamin A | 12 % |
| Vitamin C | 5 % |
| Calcium | 7 % |
| Iron | 0 % |
This is brilliant!!’ Thank you so much for sharing!!
Excellent info. Thank you Renee!!
Okay, how would we go about adding more calories. Your recipe is 62 calories and I believe Awesome Sauce boasts 180 calories. Hmm.
Hi Cassie! The nutritional information above is for a 1 ounce serving, but the packaged Awesome Sauce is about 2 ounces, which is one of the reasons why the calories are not equivalent.
The carbohydrates are way lower here too. AS has 45g per serving (1.9oz).
Can’t wait to try this! Have you tried freezing it so that you can make it in bulk? If so, does it keep well?
I have tried freezing it 🙂 The liquid is purged out of the rice when it’s frozen, so it ends of having an odd (grainy) texture unless you reheat it a bit to essentially rehydrate the rice. Microwaving it for a bit and then refrigerating it before eating it works just fine!
Wanted to report back and say that I made this with some modifications based on my preferences and also what I had on hand – slightly less maple syrup, slightly more salt, no pecans, and more applesauce in lieu of apple juice. Cooked it really down so that it was nice and dense. It came out great! It does have a weird grainy texture when frozen and then thawed, but as you said, reheating it for just a bit makes it nice and smooth again. Thanks for the recipe!
That’s one of the great things about this… You can easily modify as it suits your needs/preferences!
Can I please get recipe for cannaberry
Zach, try substituting fresh banana and strawberry for the yam (and don’t cook it with the rice). Use coconut water instead of apple juice. Add 3 Tbls melted coconut oil or even better, MCT oil. Add about 1 Tbls lemon juice at the end, to taste. Leave out the cinnamon, vanilla, ginger, pecans, and applesauce.
Do you know the ratio of sucrose/glucose to fructose? Did you add water to avoid overdoing the fructose level? I am trying to figure out how to raise the calories somewhat but with a 2:1 sucrose/glucose to fructose ratio.
This is where the science comes in, right? 🙂 There aren’t as many online tools for figuring out the sucrose, glucose, and fructose content, like there are to calculate nutritional information like calories. And when you start googling it, you discover that it’s even more complicated than you might think, e.g. with sweet potato, the cooking time and method with change the type of sugar, namely maltose (a disaccharide formed from two units of glucose joined with an α-bond between the glucose units and is a two-unit member of the amylose homologous series which is the major structural component of starch) ! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3791245/
Any idea of how long this would last in the refrigerator?
It’s probably similar to regular rice… If you want to keep it for a while in the refrigerator, adding a bit more liquid (water) will help – because rice tends to continue to absorb water and eventually dry out if kept in the fridge for a while. And I’d personally probably not keep it in the fridge longer than about a week or a week and a half!