A few weeks back, I picked up a ton of different grains and stuff from the farmers market and a couple of health food stores. I bought amaranth, brown teff, chia, rolled oats and millet, among other things, and we started making our own granola-type bars.
I pop the amaranth, toast the millet on the stove and the oats in the oven, throw the chia in raw and sprinkle the teff on top. I use honey cooked to soft ball stage (about 244 degrees F) to hold it all together and then I press the mixture in a cookie sheet lined with wax paper to a bar-type thickness and then once it's cooled cut it into individual pieces and wrap them with wax paper.
The first batch got a bit sweet, and we learned that we probably shouldn't use blueberry honey anymore. They had Hunza raisins and roasted pumpkin seeds and were kinda chewy.
The next batch we wanted to be a nut bar. So I added crushed raw almonds, pumpkins seeds and roasted, salted sunflower meats and when I sprinkled the teff on, I also sprinkled toasted sesame seeds.
This time around, I wanted to do vanilla, cranberry, almond. So I toasted the stuff that needed toasting, crushed the almonds, popped the amaranth mixed everything together in a bowl. Then for the vanilla part, I used corn syrup flavored with vanilla extract instead of honey.
Apparently, this mixture does not behave the same as honey does, because the bars got very crumbly. I couldn't actually cut them into bars. But I'm thinking, well, we're just crumble it and put it in baggies, no big deal. Except it won't come loose from the wax paper either.
So I threw them out. But that aggravated me because I really wanted cranberry almond granola bars. So I went back out to the kitchen and started over. Toast the millet, pop the amaranth, mix in the chia (oops! poured in way to much, scoop some back out), add the toasted oats, crushed almonds, dried cranberries.
I figure, since I know honey works, we'll use honey. Cook the honey, mix it with the dry ingredients, press it on the cookie sheet.
But I still need vanilla, so I add white chips. I'm fully expecting the chips to melt when I press them in, because the bars were still hot, but it never occured to me that it was too hot to work with white chocolate yesterday. They melted, alright, and never hardened.
So I had to put them in the fridge. I guess I'll find out tomorrow if they actually turned out or not.
