So I finally finished off the last of my pre-mixed 2.3.0 and can now move on to the new formulation.
As I said earlier, the big change in the new formulation was the removal of the almond meal; along with new corn flour and some tweaked amounts of the protein and other stuff. Allegedly the new mix tastes like tortilla chips since it’s made from the same flour you use for corn tortillas/tortilla chips. I haven’t had a chance to taste it (that will be tomorrow) but it certainly smells like tortilla chips!
I thought I would document mixing up a batch of 3 days worth. According to the time stamps on the photos this took around 30 minutes. I suspect I could do it in far less time (10-15 minutes) if I was using a better scale and containers that had larger openings… and I wasn’t taking photos or doing stuff with the kids the whole time. I don’t want to champion this being best practices, in fact I anxiously anticipate many from the DIY soylent community to say “why are you doing x when it’s so much easier to do y?” – I’ll likely do a followup or two with MOAR BETTER-ER methods.
So I use my harbor freight scale with quart bottles. I’m doing 3 days at a time so I can kinda do it like an assembly line.
- Put a bottle on the scale
- hit the “tare” button to zero the weight measurement
- dump ingredient into the bottle until I hit the desired weight
- swap bottle, goto step 1
For the bulky ingredients (the corn and whey protein isolate) this is super easy, aside from messing up and dumping powder over the side. This is why it would be nice to have a larger opening. If I put too much it’s *usually* easy to just spoon out the excess, though this gets tricky for some of the ingredients that are in smaller quantities (like 4 or 2 grams). With the smaller ones it becomes difficult to get *just* the one I want out without getting some of the last one, adding it in piles makes this a little easier. Also: get a good scale with 0.01 g resolution. Mine tends to stick at a particular weight. I’ll add a bunch of salt and it will hold at 1.2 g (or something) and then suddenly jump up to 5.3. Eventually it settles down and shows the right weight (I think) but it’s annoying and slows me down a lot.
The old formulation had denser almond meal so this new one takes up more volume, almost exactly 1 US quart, aka 4 cups, aka 32 fluid ounces, aka 0.946353 liters (you can call it 1 liter if you like). The last one gave me 1/2 cup less – so this new one will fill 4 of the larger Blenderbottles with what appears to be a best practice: 1 cup/8 oz of powder mixed with water up to the top after shaking.
I suppose I could leave the powder in the quart jars and put lids on them but the zip-lock bags fit in the cupboard better. As of yet I haven’t figured out a decent way to mix the oil in with the powder that doesn’t just coat the inside of the bag with oil and have the powder stick to it. Maybe others have suggestions. For now I’m just adding the oil to the mixture after I add the water, usually right about the time I’ve been adding some vanilla. I’ll have to see what 3.0.1 tastes like without vanilla, I tried adding some taco seasoning to 2.3.0 and while it was actually quite good, it’s not the sort of thing I could handle more than a test shot glass of.
Anyhow that’s it! Tomorrow I’ll actually mix it up and see how the new formulation goes.
