There’s the fantasy of summer snacking — savoring wild berries and a hunk of freshly baked sourdough, maybe on a rocky outlook or sandy dune — and then there’s the reality of tearing open a store-bought snack bar and shoving it down for sustenance on a hike or after a swim. The flavor’s rarely interesting enough to register beyond sweet, and the texture, often chewy the way you’d imagine melted plastic would be, rarely brings to mind real food.
Recipe: No-Bake Salted Maple Nut Bars
Just because snack bars are undeniably convenient doesn’t mean they can’t satisfy like a great homemade dish, with a riot of textures and hits of salty and sweet. That’s why you should be making your own.
It may sound like a project, but this five-ingredient recipe comes together in less than 15 minutes, doesn’t require turning on the oven and chills in the refrigerator to set. Its greatest appeal, though, is how it combines the crackle of nuts and the creaminess of nut butter with earthy maple syrup. A fat pinch of salt and a touch of pepper bring out the toasty bittersweetness of so many nuts.
Mixing the ingredients and pressing them into a pan is simple. Coming up with the right proportions and technique is a little less so. It took a dozen tries to nail down a no-bake formula that wasn’t too sugary, but still held together with different add-ins.
For more tips on how to get homemade bars to adhere, I reached out to Susie Theodorou, a food stylist and author who sometimes works with New York Times Cooking. Even before she created recipes for her “No-Cook Cookbook,” she experimented with no-bake bars and found that blending plump dried fruits like dates, figs and apricots bound bars well. When I told her I wanted to make protein bars that leaned savory, she suggested skipping the fruit because nut butter provides the moisture the fruit would.
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But nut butter isn’t sticky enough to glue dry ingredients on its own (and it’s a boring one-note flavor solo), so I boiled down maple syrup into a tacky base with butterscotch depth. Once the blend simmers into smooth ribbons, it can seal oats, nuts and seeds into a slab with a Goldilocks texture: not too crunchy, not too chewy, but with a just-right crispness.
To keep the bars from crumbling, it’s important to use quick-cooking oats, which are flatter and smaller than old-fashioned ones. Chopping nuts into pebbly bits also helps, as does completely coating the dry ingredients before pressing the mix firmly into the pan. If you’re using almond butter, you’ll need more of it — even the smoothest almond butter is grainier than peanut butter.
The black pepper sharpens the syrup’s caramel roundness, but try ground chipotle or other dried chiles for a smoky heat. There’s plenty of salt, but if you want even more, sprinkle flakes on top before chilling. From there, feel free to customize the nuts and seasoning, being sure to keep the ratios the same, and you’ll have a snack as special as any summer treat.
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Genevieve Ko is a deputy editor and columnist for the Food section and NYT Cooking, for which she also develops recipes.
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