Chlorella Protein Bar Recipe

Not only is this recipe great for building your own protein bar, but it also provides you with your daily intake of chlorella in a delicious way! Now you can control how many nutrients and sugars are in your protein bar while giving your body a powerful detoxification too.

Ingredients:

• 20 whole (pitted) dates
• 1/2 cup whole raw almonds
• 1/4 cup popped amaranth
• 1/2 cup peanut butter
• 3 tbsp (18 g) Wuji Organic Chlorella Powder
• 1/4 cup chocolate chips; preferably dark chocolate (optional)

Directions:

Check each date to make sure all the pits and their caps are removed from the fruit (even the already pitted ones sometimes contain pits).

Place them into a food processor and pulse until the dates form a ball.

Remove the dates and place in separate bowl. Now add the almonds into the food processor and pulse until they are still a little chunky.

I like the crunch of the almond pieces, but if you prefer not to feel the texture in your bars, then keep pulsing until it’s basically almond meal.

Pour this into the bowl with the dates and add the remaining ingredients except the amaranth and chocolate. We are going to pop the amaranth instead of adding it raw; this way it’s a nice texture, similar to rice crisps, instead of hard pellets of raw amaranth.

Get a small saucepan or saute pan on the stove and set for medium-high heat. Finding the right temperature for your stove can be a little tricky, but the great thing about popped amaranth is that even the ones that don’t pop get cooked a little bit and they are easier to chew.

Leave the pan dry and let the pan come up to temperature first; you may notice the pan start smoking and this about when you should add your amaranth. HOWEVER, don’t do all the amaranth at once! If you try to pop ¼ cup of amaranth all at once, you will definitely have more than a few burnt ones in there.

I would recommend doing 1-2 tablespoons of raw amaranth at a time. Once you add them to the pan, they should start popping immediately. Keep the pan covered so you don’t lose a bunch of amaranth onto the floor and create a big mess! Also, I usually remove the pan from heat as soon as I put the amaranth in the pan. It won’t take long for them to finish popping. Do this in batches until you fill a ¼ cup measuring container. Add to the bowl with the rest of the ingredients.

Using your hands, mix together the ingredients (if you use a utensil, it just takes too long because the dates are harder to distribute amongst the mix). When it’s completely mixed, you should have a shiny ball that looks a little like this:

Pick a pan that you would like to shape your bars with; I usually use a bread loaf pan for one batch of these. You might consider using an 8×8 or 9×13 pan if doubling or tripling the recipe. Spread out the bar mix so that it’s even across the pan. Either refrigerate if you like it as is or set aside if you would like to cover in chocolate!

If doing the chocolate, set up a double-boiler system: a pan of water on low to medium heat with a bowl or another pan sitting on top.

Place your chocolate chips in the bowl on top and begin to melt.

Once melted, you can either cover the entire batch of bars in chocolate or use your spatula to just drizzle some over the top.

I personally like the flavor of the algae (tastes a lot like seaweed), so I only drizzled. If you want to cover that flavor up more, by all means, use more chocolate! Just be aware of how much extra sugar you are adding though: one point of doing this yourself is to avoid all the added sugar the industry puts into pre-packaged protein bars.

When you are finished, it should look a little like this:

Simply refrigerate this for 30 minutes to an hour to let everything set and then cut into bars. Wrap them or put them into a covered container and enjoy! Nothing in this recipe is perishable, so you can totally leave them out at room temp if you’d like. I recommend cutting into 6 bars, as the ingredients were designed to optimize nutrients with this many servings per batch.

Calcium                                6%

Iron                                     52%