Synectar

How do individual ingredients of our DIY “miracle” smell, stink and taste?

Since we are a bit on the technical side, we naturally like to know exactly what parts create the whole, so before we tasted the first complete recipe we met and dealt with every ingredient individually.

So what do we put in there?

For whoever is interested in our exact recipe with all the technicalities, we have this article, but the following photos and notes are somewhat more interesting – they deal with sensoric tests and our own subjective feelings and opinions.

Let’s start with the ingredient that constitutes the majority of the weight of our mix: protein.

Protein is lumpy powder with very fine structure. By itself it’s pretty sticky in your mouth. Unflavoured protein has no flavour (surprise), but we were quite surprised that the vanilla variant was only mildly sweet and less aggressive than expected. The chemical aftertaste is a bit worse though, you can feel the synthetic sweetener there – at least Pavol can. Pure protein will almost immediately dry up your mouth and once you breath in you’re about to cough badly and spread the protein all around (which is by the way a good idea for a party game – “keep that protein in your mouth and don’t get cough attack”). Compliments go to Libor and his protein-covered bathroom.

The second heaviest component is the ultra fine Scottish oats.

We got hit with pleasant smell of oatmeal right after opening this pack and the powder is tasty just by the looks of it (right?). Structurally, it’s – wait for it – milled oats. Eating it alone will again get you to a sticky situation, but the taste is truly delightful and oatsy.

Continuing with a source of carbs – Palatinose. Which is just marketing term for disacharid called isomaltulose.

The powder is again very fine, but ground for the tongue. We were happy to find that Palatinose is not exceedingly sweet – tiny hints only with a sweet aftertaste, which enables us to use our creativity more while finding flavorings for our Synectar. Pavol also says that it’s less sweet than maltodextrin (the main carb in e.g. Soylent or Mana) and less sticky too.

Here we have Psyllium, which is grinded seed coat of Indian plantago and our main source of fibre.

It looks like small scales that grow and become sticky when you wet them. This is probably the least pleasant part of the recipe as far as the consistency is considered – you feel like eating that coconut pieces with which some sweets are sprinkled. If we are able to replace this fibre source with something different (e.g. using a protein of plant origin), we’ll be glad.

Next in line is Potassium Gluconate, which is simply a pure potassium source.

It has no taste.

Ingredient no. 6 is Choline Bitartrate, which is a source of, hmm…choline.

This little bag is filled with stinky secret, reminding us of fish or something foul. The taste, on the other hand, is unexpected – sour like vitamin C, but not unpleasant, with bitter aftertaste. It looks like table salt and melts is quickly dissolved.

Ingredient covering multivitamin and minerals for us is Kirkland Signature Daily Multi Vitamins & Minerals.

Classic multivitamin tablets. We don’t recommend chewing on those, they are bitter and gross. Fortunately, 1 tablet spread in 3 meals (1 day) is unnoticeable. We crush them with knife against the knife board, like when your kid refuses to eat the tablet in whole (we crush the tablets, not the kids, of course).

Then we have this combo of Calcium + vitamin D3 + vitamin K1 in gelatine capsules.

Tasteless powder. I keep the empty gelatine kapsules in a bag and Pavol always asks for my reason for that. I don’t know, probably so that the police can have something to inquire about once they raid my place.

What’s left? The table salt, of which we have no photos, because everyone knows salt, even though we used the pink, Himalayan salt in the first batch (but not the bath salts!). And then there’s the oil of our choice – the original recipe contains the rapeseed oil, I use olive oil, Pavol even tried the pumpkin oil with success. It certainly shuffles the nutrition values a little bit, but it’s mainly a source of fats and omega fatty acids for us.

Bon appétit!