I've often seen mention of low carb granola recipes and yesterday when looking for something entirely unrelated, I found a recipe for a low sugar granola I must have saved some time ago, which these days would still be too high carb as it was based on oats and dried fruit, but it used a method that I thought might be interesting. So I'm posting about the technique as such, rather than a specific recipe.
I have been trying 9bars as a possible food to put in a pocket whilst out walking and we're going on holiday soon so tried some to see how I was with them as I have a lot of food sensitivites. I wondered if this technique might work for making my own version of a seeded and nutty 'energy' bar. It works, but doesn't hold together into a bar well enough, but does make a nice granola style crunch, I've just popped a handful into Greek yogurt and it was very nice.
The technique is to use 300ml of cloudy apple juice (33g carbs on top of your chosen dry ingredients) and you put it in a pan and bring it to the boil and leave it simmering until about 30% of the original volume. It said it should be thick and sticky at this point, but mine just looked darker and not especially any thicker. I mixed up a batch of my chosen dry ingredients - mine weighed abut 250g in the end. The original recipe was for 170g, but as there was a lot of oats, I suspected they would soak up the juice and my ingredients wouldn't.
I mixed sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, pine nuts, dessicated coconut, flaked almonds, chopped pecans, golden flax seeds and salted peanuts - one of the 9bars uses these and I thought they'd add bulk with minimal carbs, I wiped much of the salt off with a paper towel. I chopped some of the larger ingredients and left some whole as I wanted different sized pieces, hoping it would press into a bar better.
What I would suggest is to add the reduced apple juice a little at a time to your chosen dry ingredients and mix until they're all coated - you don't want any additional liquid running loose, mine was too wet and took a while to cook off. Spread it out onto a large baking tray and bake in the oven - I did it at Reg 4 (180C) and after an initial 10 minutes, in 5 minute batches, taking it out and turning it and retuning it until it looked dry, golden and clumping together.
The batch I made worked out at 70g carbs for the entire tray (I estimate about 265g in weight, my husband ate some before I had chance to weigh the cooked batch), which if you put 20g into some yogurt would add about 5.2g carbs. It's possibly too rich like this as a dish in itself, but as a topping or accompaniment is quite decadent. It's quite protein rich too - but that was what I wanted initially.
There are many recipes with alternative sweeteners and coconut oil etc, but for those of us who don't eat sweeteners. it's an alternative method to add some sweetness to a dish. I was hoping that if it made a suitable bar it might be a little lower carbs than the 9bars, but it's in the same ballpark, at 13g for a 50g serving.