I’ve recently started consuming Huel (affiliate link), a popular meal replacement powder from the UK, which is similar to Soylent. For convenience sake, I need a solid food to carry with me sometimes, and quite frankly, sometimes I’m just too lazy to make a shake. With this in mind, I decided to apply my experience in creating protein bars to making Huel bars.

Ryan's Huel bar

The easiest way to make bars from powder (or other solids), is to bind them together with sugar. This makes them stick together and stay nice and solid, plus it adds a nice sweet kick for your taste buds. Unfortunately sugar is not considered to be terribly good for us, and since the goal of Huel is to remain as healthy as possible, I’ve used a similar elrecipe to when I make extremely high protein, low carbohydrate bars. As a binding agent, I used high cocoa content chocolate and peanut butter.

Taste

The taste of these bars is rather average. They’re not as tasty as my protein bars and they’re certainly not as tasty as something like a Snickers bar. But neither of those could be considered a particularly healthy alternative to a “normal” meal, whereas these bars are quite viable as a complete meal replacement, much like the Huel powder it was made from.

They’re perfect directly from the freezer. They do hold their solidity at room temperature, but they’re quite squishy and pliable, so you will need to put them in a hard container to transport them. I believe this issue with solidity will make it quite difficult for manufacturers to create off the shelf products with a similar nutritional profile, hopefully I can be proven wrong though.

Nutrition

100 g per serving (one 150 g bar)
Energy 354 kcal 531 kcal
Total fat 19 g 28 g
Saturated fat 3.7 g 5.5 g
Monounsaturated fat 1.3 g 2 g
Protein 21 g 32 g
Total carbohydrate 25 g 37 g
Sugars 2.0 g 3.0 g
Dietary Fiber 5 g 7.5 g
Polyunsaturated fat 4 g 6 g
Trans fat 0 g 0 g
Cholesterol 0 mg 0 mg
Sodium 650 mg 975 mg
Potassium 212 mg 318 mg

Wet ingredients

  • 50 g peanut butter*
  • 25 g 81% cocoa chocolate
  • 150 mL water **

* The only ingredient in the peanut butter was peanuts
** This is an estimate as I forgot to measure the exact amount

Dry ingredients

  • 150 g Huel (unflavoured, unsweetened)
  • 10 g Stevia (pure/crystalline)
  • 2.5 g creatine monohydrate

Instructions

Heat the wet ingredients in a microwave until they can be thoroughly mixed, then pour the mixture into the dry ingredients and kneed and roll it until it forms a single blob. Add more water if the mixture is too dry and powdery. Mould it into bar forms, then leave to sit in the freezer for a few hours.

Future improvements

You may like to add more flavour into the mixture. Huel sell flavour pouches which may go well with the mixture. You could also add things like cranberries, along with more chocolate and peanut butter to improve the taste (you will need extra chocolate and peanut butter to help bind the bar together when adding extra things).