No Protein Powder! High Protein Vegan Granola Bars (10g Protein)

You have never seen a granola bar this healthy in a grocery store. I can tell you that much for free. These are chewy, crispy, crunchy. They're so gosh darn good. Packed with protein and fiber and made with a ton of healthy whole food ingredients, you guys. Plus, you will never guess the healthy ingredient that makes them so crunchy and high in protein. Unless, of course, you watch this channel all the time, then you might have a knickling as to what that ingredient is because I use it all the time. Now, if you guys have watched any of my videos recently, you've probably seen my strawberry lemon protein granola. Maybe you've even tried making my protein cereal. Those recipes really inspired the making of these granola bars. And you know what the secret ingredient is for those recipes? Bueller. TVP. T-V-P. Textured vegetable protein, if you don't know what that is. It's these little crispy soy granules, okay? And they're packed with protein, most commonly used as vegan meat replacements when you hydrate them in water. But we're not hydrating them in water today. Nay, nay. We are keeping them in their solid state, in their crispy, crunchy, granular forms because they are crispy little buggers that make a really good granola bar, apparently. So that makes up the protein base for these granola bars. But we've got some other really great ingredients I'm gonna go through as we start making them. So grab yourself a big bowl, okay? We've got one and a quarter cups of TVP. Into the bowl. Next we've got one cup of rolled oats. Very standard, typical granola ingredient. A quarter cup of ground flaxseed. Plus a quarter cup of hemp seeds. And two tablespoons... Sploons. Tablespoons. Two tablespoons plus two teaspoons of chia seeds. We've also got a quarter cup of some pumpkin seeds. Now I actually prefer to chop mine up. Just so that they're a little bit more similarly shaped to the other ingredients. And actually this helps the granola bar mixture to stick together more. And then we've got some powdered peanut butter. Now, if you are nut free or you have a peanut allergy, you can totally leave this out. And if you would rather turn this into, say, I don't know, a chocolatey recipe, you could simply sub it out for some cocoa powder. Which actually, I'm gonna be using a mix of both of them in this version. So in this case, I'm using two tablespoons of powdered peanut butter. Two tablespoons of cocoa powder. If I were doing this non-chocolatey, I would do a quarter cup of powdered peanut butter. If I was doing it fully chocolatey, I would be doing a quarter cup of just cocoa powder. Basically, it's kind of you do you. And since we're doing the chocolate theme in this demonstration, I've also got half a cup of some chocolate chips. And then lastly, for the dry ingredients, we've got some Medjool dates. These ones, oh man. I got some real big, juicy, caramelly, squidgy ones. You can literally see they're like practically melting in my hands. They're so moist. These are exactly the kinds of date quality we're looking for. But we're not adding them in whole. We need to chop them up, which is a bit of a sticky situation. So just roll your sleeves up, chop them into like pea-sized pieces, and then throw them in the bowl. These are going to kind of act as like our sticky, sweet binder. They're playing multiple roles here. And now we are just going to mix all these dry ingredients together as best you can. We still have some wet ingredients to add, which we will get to in a moment. But just try first to get all the dry ingredients mixed as best as you can before we move on to stirring in the wet ingredients. Because pretty much once we've got the wet ingredients in, it's go time. And these things need to get into the oven ASAP. Grab yourself another small little bowl for the wet ingredients. And we're going to add a quarter cup plus two tablespoons of some tahini. This is also what I use in my protein granola and protein cereal because it's such a great binder without like making the mixture too wet, too sticky. And it tastes great, adds nutty flavor. And I love it. We've got a quarter cup of maple syrup. You can always sub this out for a date syrup if you'd prefer. And what I like to do before even stirring it up is pop this in the microwave for about 20 seconds just to make sure it mixes up really nicely. And it's, you know, pretty, pretty runny. And now we're just going to mix it all up. And we're going to throw in a teaspoon of vanilla extract into the mix. That's it for wet ingredients, baby. All right, next up, we're going to add in the wet to the dry. But I'm going to say this now. And I said it before in my protein granola and protein cereal. As soon as you add liquid ingredients to TVP, it's go time. You really got to get in there like right now. Okay, we can do this. We really only want to be mixing for like two minutes max. Mixy, mixy. You might start to think like we're off the bat. Dang, this does not look like nearly enough liquid to possibly be enough to bind all these dry ingredients together. But trust the process. Seriously, just keep stirring and it will start to form almost like granola, wouldn't you know it? You'll know that you've done a good job when you get to the point where you scrape the bottom and there's like no chia seeds stuck to the bottom. There's no powder. It's just like, you know, a clean scrape. At which point we're going to yoink, grab ourselves a 9x9 baking tray. I like to line mine with parchment paper. Now we are going to dump it to crumpet boot. So at this point, you're going to take your spatula and you're going to first just kind of get it into a relatively smooth, even layer. And you're going to press down as hard as you can first with your spatula. This is going to be our first press. Yes, we are going to do a second press with another instrument. All you gotta do is take another sheet of parchment paper, slide it on top. And then you could do it one of two ways. You could get like a measuring cup, something with a really sturdy, very flat bottom and start kind of pressing in. But that'll eventually kind of hurt your hands. You could always use a drinking glass as well. My preferred method is to use something like a totally flat little bench scraper. And then I like to really get in there and press it down pretty much with like all my body weight. This will give it a really, really flat, smooth surface. And it should compress it, compact it down enough. You can also like fold down the edges here and then use your bench scraper to like really flatten this out so they're not like coming up. You catch my drift? This is why I work out, just so I can make granola bars at home. Now, this might seem wild, but just roll with me. What I like to do is very carefully not keep the granola bar mixture in the tin. I'll explain why. But what you're going to do is very, very gently slide it onto a flat tray. The reason why we want to do this is because we don't want to trap much steam around the sides. Like we want to eliminate the possibility of steam building up as much as possible. Keep things like airy, easy, breezy. So there you have it. Now just pop her in a 325 Fahrenheit oven or if you're using convection like I am, lower it down to 300 degrees. And we're going to bake these for just 20 minutes. That's literally all you need. And literally all I need is for you to hit that subscribe button below. Yeah, it is right there. It's totally free to subscribe to Steamy Vegan. I just love being here every single week to help you live your happiest, most plantiest life you could possibly live. So like this video, hit that notification bell so you're among the first to get notified when I post a new video. And hey, if you want to support me in a fun new way, you can totally check out my channel memberships and Patreon, which are new by the way, right down here. Hey, voila! 20 minutes in the future. Oh my god, these smell like chocolate chip cookies. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Okay, so we're just gonna let these cool. Put them over on the cooling rack for a bit. And once they're just warm, like still a little bit warm, that's when we can cut them. I recommend 12 bars. 12 gives like, you know, a decently sized granola bar that like will actually, you know, satisfy you, fill you up. And then if you choose to drizzle some, you know, melted chocolate on top if you want to be like extra fancy and all that, wait until they're completely cooled, like so. Also, hey, from the next day, outfit change. Seriously, you guys, look at these. We've got the drizzled chocolate. We've got some flaky sea salt on top just for giggles and because I felt like that would be really delicious. These things are like hefty. They've got some serious girth to them. They're a substantial little snack here, you guys. And honestly, they smell so good. I just need to try one like right the heck now. Yeah, baby. They're like the perfect balance of chewiness, crispiness, crunchiness. They've literally got everything. They're all that in a bag of chocolate chips. You guys seriously need to make these. I have so many amazing recipes coming up on the channel. Very soon, you guys. I'm talking things like tortilla soup. I've got some meal preps. I've got pumpkin spice recipes out the wazoo. You guys should make sure you're subscribed below so you don't miss out on any of that good stuff. Thank you for being here. I love you. Don't forget to hit that notifications bell and I will see you in another video real soon. Ta-ta!