Never Buy These 5 Store Bought Snacks Again!

So you've been loving the 15 minute meals. Having those breakfast, lunch and dinner options that you can turn to when you don't have that much time is essential for any pro home cook. But for me, well, I'm also a snacker and I think it's very important that we don't undervalue the time in between meals when you have those salty or sweet cravings. And what I generally regret doing is turning to the bag of chips or the process, whatever it is. And that's what this video is about. I'm going to be showing you my top five snacks of all time. Those munchies that are going to satisfy your sweet and salty craving, but they're going to do it in a much more sustainable way because they are all completely made from scratch and they all come together with just five ingredients each. All right, first up are these cheese crackers. Now these have become my absolute favorite in the lab. Oven preheated. Good first step. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Thank you, beeper. These have become my absolute favorite in the last three, four months I've been making them. Every other week I would say. You would think making crackers from scratch would be a little difficult, but it's really not. It's actually really simple with this method. Now it all starts with cheese. Really any cheese you want that's going to have a nice melting consistency. Cheddar, classic obviously. If you want them to be yellow, use a yellow cheese. This, I don't even know what this is. My mom brought this up and left it here, but I like it. It smells good. It's going in these crackers. Cut this into chunks so it processes easier. So like all of these snack recipes today, I just eyeball the amounts, but if you want exact ratios, just click the blog link below. Now we process. You just want it crumbly like that. Now for your flours, you really can use anything. I'm going to make these gluten free with some almond flour and a little bit of cassava flour, but feel free to use actual wheat flour. Go in with about a half cup of almond flour, about a quarter cup of cassava flour. Finally a whole bunch of cracked pepper, Ethan style. The cracked pepper king. A little bit of spice, paprika. You can use herbs in this, rosemary, thyme, that's going to be great. Totally customizable. And then finally some salt. I've got some water. We'll start blending and then slowly stream in your water. Check it. It actually smells great. There you go. That's a nice dough right there. Now watch how easy it is to roll these out. Parchment paper. Plop. Just form that into a ball. Another piece of parchment paper or plastic wrap. I don't think I have a rolling pin. All right, I don't have a rolling pin, so this will do. Oh, it's not the best. So just start rolling it and when you get about here, see how rough those edges are? Fold and fold and fold and fold. A little square. Now back on. We'll roll into an even rectangle. I don't know what the exact measurement is, maybe between an eighth and a quarter of an inch. No one wants a thick a** cracker. You want a nice thin crispy cracker. Take a peek. I'm happy with that. Slide this onto a cutting board and get some crackers. Chopstick. Boom. So what I'll do is I'll take this whole sheet, slide that onto a baking sheet. Like I said, oven preheated. Throw that in there. I'll bake for 15 minutes. Now once these have cooked a bit, they'll be able to break apart and then I'll cook them again to get those edges crispy. All right, 15 minutes up. Look at these. Wow. They've got some bubbles. They've puffed up just a little bit. Looking good. So I'll pop these here. Turn the oven up just a bit to 375 Fahrenheit and I'm just going to retrace the lines, pushing a little harder this time. This way. Back on. Oh, now you can see those break right apart. So the goal here is just to give each cracker a little bit of room between the edges so they get that crispy side. And back in the oven. I would say those only need like five minutes. All right, so these actually took 10 minutes to cook in here. Let's see on the undercarriage. Now that's crispy. Wow. Bubbly just like a Cheez-It. Now the nice thing about hand rolling is that some will be a little bit on the chewier side, the thicker ones, and then some like this, it's super crispy. But it's amazing that you get some flakiness in there. Actual taste test. Mmm. Okay. That one was the perfect texture, blend between chewy and crunchy. It's amazing that you can make a cheese cracker like this with just a few ingredients. These are salty, they're satisfying, and they're great to have around in the pantry. So you can't really call this ice cream per se, but this is by far my favorite frozen dessert because one, it's incredible, but more importantly, you don't need an ice cream maker. First thing I'm going to do is freeze some bananas. Generally three larger bananas will give you a good pint of ice cream, which is how much I tend to make at one time. I'm going to rip the bananas into pieces and pop them on a baking sheet with some parchment paper, making sure they're not touching to avoid clumping together when they actually freeze. And then I'll toss them in the freezer overnight. But if you're really pushing it, you could probably get away with freezing these for four hours at minimum. Once the bananas are frozen, I'm going to add them to a food processor along with some coconut milk to add a little extra creaminess and up the fat content. But really you could use any milk or fake milk product that you have in your pantry or you prefer. And then blend to creamy perfection. Let's take a peek. Wow. Look at that ice cream consistency. That is silky right there. That looks like straight up gelato. Wow. Two ingredients. I've never tasted so good. Now that is creamy and delicious, but there's two more things I want to add. You top it with whatever you want. For me, I really like this combo. Walnuts, chocolate. These are actually Stevia sweetened chips to make it just a little healthier. And what I'm going to do is just add some walnuts, chips, and then I'll just give it a few pulses. Okay. Now it was good before. That right there. Bananas, coconut, walnut, chocolate. Four ingredients actually. So honestly, when you have a fake ice cream like this, it's a long shot to compare that to a cream and sugar base, like a real ice cream base, which is why adding some textural elements, adding some more flavor with the nuts and the chocolate. To me, it kind of needs that to really hold up and this is holding up great. I'm not missing a dairy based ice cream at all. So if you've been following the channel for a bit, you know I moved into this kitchen a few months ago, which is why you see these exposed cabinets. I just took the doors off. This is temporary. I'm actually doing a bigger renovation next month, but I couldn't live without some exposed shelves because I like being able to see my options, which brings me into the sponsor of today's video, Thrive Market. Thrive is an online marketplace on a mission to make healthy living easy and affordable. Now as a pro home cook, my goal is to create a cooking environment that enables me to produce healthy meals, and in this case, snacks on a daily basis. At Thrive, you can find everything you need from those organic essential pantry goods to clean beauty supplies and even non-toxic cleaning supplies. And the shopping experience is super streamlined, where you can filter out products by either your personal values or dietary preferences. But most importantly, I trust that Thrive products are high quality, which puts me at a big head start when I'm making all of these snacks completely from scratch. And if you're interested in joining Thrive, you can choose your membership term. I go with a 12-month membership, which comes down to $5 a month, but if you're not sure and you just want to try Thrive, you can choose a shorter term. And you can use the link below in my description to get 40% off your first order and a free gift when you join Thrive Market today. Now back to some more snacks. All right, I am making dragon roll fruit roll-ups. No, that doesn't make sense. I'm making dragon fruit roll-ups. And guess what? This is only four ingredients, which is insane. It does come with a longer cooking time, but the actual prep couldn't be easier. You can use any fresh fruit or frozen fruit to make a fruit leather. I'm going to go with frozen fruit. And to really ramp it up a notch, I'm going to use some dragon fruit or pitaya. So I'll dump out two packets of that into a food processor, along with some frozen mango to just bulk it up and balance out that tropical flavor. Now I'm going to hit it with some maple syrup, which is optional. But if you want this to resemble candy, well, a little extra sweetener won't hurt. Finally, I'm going to squeeze in some lime juice to really just kick up the flavor and give a little bite to these fruit roll-ups. Look at the color on that. That's why I love using dragon fruit. Now this can be a little tricky to smooth out, but just do your best. And in the end, it will all even out once it sits there for a minute. All right, so we have our even layer of dragon fruit mango puree. Now you can set your oven at a higher temperature if you want this to cook faster. Say 275 Fahrenheit, it will cook in two hours. But at those higher temperatures, the sugars will caramelize and you'll get something like this right here. If you choose the low and slow, like 175 Fahrenheit, you're not really cooking at this temperature. You're more dehydrating. So it'll take a little longer, but you'll get a nice chewy fruit roll-up texture. I'll set it for two hours and check back then. All right, so it's been about two hours on this dragon fruit at 175. I'm going to touch this. It's really not that hot. Okay, so yeah, not totally dry there. But if I touch a corner, yeah. The corners are tacky and pretty much dry. Honestly, another 30 minutes to an hour, these should be good. Oop! Timer, we'll set it for 45. All right, finally, we're out of the oven. Maybe a few spots that are still a little moist. We've got a solid, pliable sheet of dragon fruit. Just going to cut some strips. All right, now check this action. We've got our dragon fruit mango fruit roll-up. Give it an unroll. Boom. Parchment paper still on the back. The magical unwrapping. Oh, we're losing it. We're losing it. We're good, we're good, we're good, we're good, we're good, we're good. Just a little piece lost. It's all right. We're not a goddamn factory here, but that's pretty good. Okay, and the official taste test. Ha ha! Oh my God. First of all, inhaled that fruit roll-up in three seconds. I mean, I haven't had an actual fruit roll-up in maybe 25 years, which is insane to say, but that's incredible. Plenty sweet enough just from the natural fruit and a little maple syrup. Very tropical and exotic from the dragon fruit. And just a few ingredients. So these are my go-to because they're very customizable with whatever you have in your pantry. And my daughter loves them, which is a huge bonus. Now, I'm just going to go rough measurements here, which I always do when I make anything in the kitchen, really, including these energy balls. But if you want specifics, just click the blog post below. So the dates really are your glue and your sweetener. That's one ingredient you can't skip. And I generally start off with about six or seven metajoule dates. They're nice and sticky. And nature's caramel. You know what? I want to go one more. Boop! Just make sure you take out your seeds or your food processor's really going to feel it. Next layer, we've got our nuts. I'm going with almonds and cashews. About a handful of cashews, roasted. And a handful of almonds. These are actually unroasted raw almonds. Love me some coconut in there. Same thing, just a handful and a half of those. And then finally, some chia seeds. Half handful of those. Now we'll process. It's going to be rough at first. Give it some time. If you take a look in here, beautifully processed, nice and even. But this is crumbly. Falls apart too easily. So to bring everything together, plus a final touch of flavor, just any orange or a clementine. I'll zest first, which really boosts the flavor on these. And then I'll slice. And I'll start off with just half a juice of lemon. Half a juice of orange. And then we'll just give it a few pulses. Now you can see how it's clumping together all on its own. That's what you want. Now some quick manual labor. That's all it takes. Make them whatever size you want, but that is perfect. And I'll actually refrigerate these. You can eat these right now. They're delicious, but they're pretty soft. Bit mushy, but when you refrigerate them, they become the perfect texture. So these will keep in the fridge for a while, but my guess is you'll finish them in a day or two. I find that when I have these energy balls around, it's not so much that they're giving me energy. It's kind of a ridiculous term for these. They're more like craving satisfactors. They're sweet, they're a little salty, they're filling. So I just snack better when I've prepared those at the beginning of the week. Energy ball. And finally, well, every pro-home cook should definitely be making popcorn from scratch. But more importantly, you need that one spice mix that makes popcorn extra consumable. And this cheesy spice, at this point, I don't make popcorn without it just because it's so damn addicting. And really simple. So I'm using a spice grinder here. But if you use all powdered spices, you can just mix them together. OK, so the star of the show, nutritional yeast. That's going to give it its cheesy flavor and just a lot of sort of natural umami in here. Now, this is going to make up about 75 percent of the spice mix. And really, the additional stuff is just extra flavor. Sesame seeds might seem a little crazy when blended up. I love the sesame flavor in there. I stumbled across that one day just kind of randomly and it worked great. Now, here is a curry powder. A little bit of that. You can use any ground spice, though, if you want some garlic flavor or onion powder. And then finally, it needs a good bit of salt. It is a spice mix after all. Sesame seeds still need some work. Now, one thing about using a spice grinder is you can get it super fine, so it creates a nice powdery coating on your popcorn. You want those Cheeto fingers. It should pack a nice punch. That's cheesy, that's salty, that's goodness. Let's make some popcorn. Medium heat, a little bit of oil, popcorn. Really, you just want to coat the bottom of your saucepan. One even layer. Coat those kernels in the oil. That lid. Boom. All right, once you start hearing those pops, give it a little shaky shaky so it doesn't burn in the bottom. Whoop, looking good. Whoa. Shaky shaky. It's always fun to see how many kernels I can pop in a batch. Can you get 100%? I don't think I've ever done it because you don't want to burn it, so you got to pull it at some point. That looks like a good batch. Okay. Dump. You got to see the bottom. Some of those kernels on the bottom burn a little bit. That's all right. Now, we get after it with this spice mix. Squeeze it up. Make sure to really coat it nicely. The spice mix will settle to the bottom. So you want to toss the spice mix so it actually comes up from the bottom and coats all of the popcorn. That is cheesy goodness right there. Taste for seasoning. Now, if you're trying to control your salt intake, go light on the seasoning or add less salt to your seasoning. But for me, this popcorn right here, you tell me a spice mix that beats this. Please. I know there's a lot on the market, and I have thought about bottling this up, selling it. It's just not my industry. I'd prefer to just give away the knowledge to you guys. So I've been desperately trying to save all of these for the thumbnail. But you can see I'm slowly losing snacks on each one because they're just so good. And hopefully, you were inspired to make at least one of these. It's not about cranking all of these out at once. Generally, I make one or two a week if I have the time. But it's always nice to have some in the fridge or in the pantry. If you want more quick meals, just click right here.