Kram

[Moondog55]

Taking my name from a well known book.
I am putting together a high density food bar for the winter holiday.
Lots of fat sugar and protein and a little carbohydrate.
Roasted peanuts, roasted almonds, dessicated coconut, sultanas, black sugar, Kelloggs Special K, butter, copha and Lindt special dark chocolate.
I usually use rice bubbles but the other was on special.
Mix dry ingredients.
Melt fats. Pour hot fat over dry ingredients mix well and pour into non-stick roasting pan to set. When hard cut into bars and wrap well.
Double wrapping and dipping in wax will preserve for a long time but I only need this to keep for a couple of months so just plastic and foil.

[Moondog55]

5 minutes later

[photonaturally]

That looks like 1 serve. Inadequate.

I assume that the yellow bar is butter. I was wondering what the white one is.

[Moondog55]

Yellow is butter, the other is Copha, solid coconut fat and while it is a saturated fat and hydrogenated it doesn't matter; I needed it to make the finished bars hard enough

[Pongo]

Some things that might go well in that. The obvious one is peanut butter, but also think about some milk powder

[Moondog55]

Too many whole nuts in the mix to cut neatly but all double wrapped and ready to go. I also made a small batch of double cooked Tararua biscuits just in case I start starving
In the olden days I would also have wrapped in greaseproof and then brown paper and painted with wax, which had the side benefit of a constant supply of good firelighters

[andrewa]

One of my packrafting contemporaries in Alaska seems to have a weird diet of almond butter and Pringles and a few other things on his winter trips.

Check out the food lists on this...

http://packrafting.blogspot.com.au/search/label/Food

A

[Moondog55]

Cornchips, concentrated fat starch and salt. Perfect rations for cold weather LOL

[wayno]

Yellow is butter, the other is Copha, solid coconut fat and while it is a saturated fat and hydrogenated it doesn't matter; I needed it to make the finished bars hard enough

hydrogenated fat is implicated in hardening of the arteries and cancer... lard is probably better for your health...
what science is finding out now is saturated fat and cholesterol arent nearly as bad for you as hydrogentated fat and commercially processed vegetable oils

[Moondog55]

While I am aware of all the modern research I decided the risk is minimal given my age and activity levels. Everything else will kill me before my heart gives out.
As I do not eat margarine or most other hydrogenated fats if it can be avoided, I feel that in total this amount spread over 3 or 4 weeks will little effect on my overall health.
As it has turned out the mix is too dry and crumbly at normal room temperatures which tells me I have too little fat in the mix overall so I should have doubled the amount of butter and/or used a chocolate with less cocoa.
Also I should have melted the black sugar with a little water first and added the fats to the melted sugar for better distribution. I was in a hurry to get this finished and wrapped to include in the food dump.
I have been making mixtures like this for decades; some batches are better than others but they all taste good when I am hungry

[JoshT]

You can buy unhydrogenated coconut oil at most health food shops, melting point is lower than copha though, similar to butter. Still might do the trick, and about ten billion times healthier.

Maybe you could do something like the Anzac biscuit trick with golden syrup and bicarb soda?

[Moondog55]

Hi Josh
That's the Tararua biscuits, they are cooked
The point of the fat in the Kram is to bind the dry ingredients together, as well it adds valuable calories/killerjoules to the diet, if I could afford it I would be using cocoa butter. But I have been eating chocolate crackles all my life and my heart and arteries are in reasonable shape, all things in moderation and I think we stress far too much about the small stuff.
As long as we don't try and live on a diet of mainly altered fats a small amount in our diet will likely have a very small effect in the long run and there is the distinct possibility that simply adding in 30 grams of extra fibre a day would fix the problems anyway, it is my honest opinion that it is the lack of fibre combined with excess [ empty] calories that is the main problem

[JoshT]

I was thinking you might be able to substitute the copha for virgin coconut oil, it's more expensive but not too much so if you buy in bulk. It seems to be the saturated fat of choice at the moment, heaps of good fat soluble vitamins and other good things. I think the melting point is around 25C which might be a bit too low for summer.

I'm with you on fibre stuff, it seems to be much more than just digestive system health, there's links to autism and immune responses and allergies.

[Moondog55]

The trouble with coconut oil [ all oils] is that the melting point isn't plastic; it is an all or nothing change. Cocoa butter is a little better in this regard as is dairy butter. Lucky for me I only make this stuff for winter.

[slparker]

There's a fair swag of food there... are you preparing for the Zombie Apocolypse?

[Moondog55]

3 weeks at 1 per day
Falls Creek muster in a weeks time

[icefest]

Do you mainly use them as a lunch replacement or snack?
This talk of butter and sugar is making me think of a thread on BPL talking about high calorie foods and the suggestion of butter rolled in brown sugar.

At the end of a 7 day snow trip it starts to sound really great.
-icefest

[Rob A]

If you are making them normally, do you use egg whites as a binder instead of all the solid fats?