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A Universal PB Oat Bar
Last updated: 2020-09-15

This has been my adventure in trying to make the perfect backpacking food. It had to be cheap. Lightweight. Nutritious. Filling. And of course shelf stable. All while having a perfect balance of flavors to avoid taste fatigue. After 15 iterations I feel it is as good as I can make in my home kitchen and has been a smash hit with everyone who has tried them.

It accidentally succeeded at a bunch of other things too. Let's get those buzzwords out of the way:

Nutritional information

Alongside it is the nutritional information for peanut butter Clif Bars. Those are the most similar commercial product I know of.

(nutrition image)

This recipe has 26% of the calories from sugar. Clif bars have 29%.

Ingredients

You might think I am cheating with some of those quantities. The sad reality is that those tricks routinely used by everyone. Consider how Tic Tacs are entirely sugar but have 0 calories. I am actually cheating even more that you might suspect to keep sugar out of the #1 spot: you may substitute the sugar and water with 650 grams of HFCS. That sure sounds a lot less healthy but it is identical.

Cost breakdown

Ingredient Calories Cost
peanut butter 2980 $1.50
sugar 2000 $0.36
quick oats 1890 $1.08
coconut 800 $0.92
cocoa 140 $0.38
citric acid $0.01
salt $0.01
spices $0.01
Total 7810 $4.27

Scaled out to 14000 Calories (1 week) that would be $7.65/week. For comparison Clif Bars would cost about $50/week to live off of. For the ULers they pack 4.6 calories per gram.

Instructions

  1. Mix the sugar, water, salt, citric acid.
  2. Heat to 140C - 155C. (Soft crack to hard crack range.) A candy thermometer is recommended.
  3. Optional: premix the peanut butter and oats while waiting for the sugar to boil.
  4. Let the mixture cool to 120C.
  5. Mix in the coconut, cocoa, cinnamon, cloves. Mix until the cocoa melts.
  6. Let the mixture cool to 105C. A non-contact IR thermometer is recommended.
  7. Mix in the peanut butter and oats. A strong wooden spoon is recommended.
  8. Dump the mixture onto an ungreased cookie sheet.
  9. Use a strong smooth object to spread the mixture evenly across the sheet.
  10. Immediately cut into squares before it cools. A wheel pizza cutter is recommended.

Here is what the finished bars look like:

There are about 3000 calories in that bowl. That bowl is also the "strong smooth object" mentioned in step #9. It has a flat bottom and I can bear down on the rim of the bowl with my weight to quickly form the rapidly cooling and stiffening mixture. An upside down glass jar with a smooth metal lid works too.

Be the smart kind of lazy with cleanup. If you've ever made candy you know that the pot used will be coated with a nearly invincible lining of hard candy. This stuff is even worse from the oily peanut butter and the fibrous oatmeal aggregate. But I don't factor removing all that into the cleanup time. Instead re-use the pot later that day to make soup! A strongly flavored and hearty soup works best to obscure the cacophony of flavors in the bars. Beef vegetable or hot and sour soups have been my favorites. The boiling water and steam will melt most of the sugar away. The rest will have softened and can be quickly scraped into the soup.

Background

Yes it uses grams. Mass-based recipes are better than volumetric measurements. The usual argument is that volumetric isn't consistent for ingredients that have a variable density. Stuff that can settle like flour. But I've found other reasons that matter more for me: It saves time because there is less cleanup. There are no greasy or oily measuring cups/spoons to wash. Easier to do nutritional calculations on since all nutritional information is mass-based. And easier to tweak. Want to reduce something by 6%? It is trivial with masses. In a volume system you are measuring out 1 7/8th cups instead of 2 cups. Such a pain.

If the mass-based recipe isn't offputting maybe the sugar is. Here is the thing: for the most part sugar is sugar. If you think cane sugar is better for you than HFCS you are wrong. They are nearly chemically and nutritionally identical. Consider that fructose (the primary sugar of honey and fruit) might be worse for you.

Honey is mostly fructose and isn't any healthier for you than any other sugar. However it is 15 times more expensive and is strongly flavored. Because of those reasons people use dramatically less of it on their food and that is good for you. If you have the will power (or adjust your recipes accordingly) to use less cane sugar then you get the same benefits.

The sugar in fruit is bad for you too. It is less bad because it is mixed with fiber. However you don't need to buy expensive fruit for that. Blending the sugar with high fiber oatmeal produces the same effect at a fraction of the cost.

Those no-bake bar recipes were the starting point that I launched from. They used honey or date paste as a binder and were a sticky mess. It also wasn't obvious how unhealthy they were. While sugar wasn't an explicit ingredient they were still 35% sugar (calorifically) all things considered. I started by replacing the expensive "paleo" sugars with an equivalent amount of plain sugar. And then began reducing the sugar as much as I could. Eventually the sugar was lowered to 26%.

The "sticky mess" part was trickier. For that I attempted to cross the recipe with peanut brittle. Peanut brittle is even more sugary at 58%. But the general idea of taking sugar up to soft crack or hard crack temperatures was sound. It also greatly reduces the water content for improved shelf stability. It is hard to test the shelf stability because everyone wants to eat them. But my oldest batch has been hidden away for 3 months and it tastes unchanged from the day it was made.

Variations and other notes

The salt may be omitted or reduced. However this is meant to be a complete meal for a physically active person. It is assumed you are sweating a lot and that lost salt must be replaced.

I am continuing to experiment and refine the recipe to lower the sugar content. 450 grams of sugar is possible and I've made it work a few times. However it gets increasingly difficult to mix the ingredients. At this level the process is more important than the ratios. The current 500g of sugar is a reliable amount and easily produces consistent results.

The "wait for it to cool" steps also require an explanation. Adding ingredients as soon as possible does give you more time to mix. However some of the ingredients are unstable at certain temperatures. I am not sure what exactly happens but it seems similar to a broken sauce. If the cocoa or peanut butter is added above those temperatures then the fats appear to render out. You will hear a sizzling sound in the bottom of the pan. The entire mixture will rapidly transform from being sticky and gooey into a dry crumbly powder. If this happens you must start over. It can't be saved. However it can be re-used as a breakfast cereal and goes great with cold milk.

If you halve the recipe then it can be cooked in a 1.7L MSR Stowaway pot. Though you need to be very attentive when boiling sugar in a pot with a bottom that thin.