5 Ingredient Nut Bars Recipe – Homemade KIND Bars! (2024)

FAQs

What makes nut bars stick together? ›

Chia seeds are often praised for their binding powers. In fact, they secure ingredients so well that they can even be used as an egg replacer. Adding just a spoonful of chia seeds to your favorite granola bar recipe will make a huge difference in its texture.

puffed millet, rice or other whole grain -- used in all 8 bars. KIND bars contain "crisp rice" in their ingredient list; however their rice pieces are tiny balls.

FDA warns some KIND bars are not so healthy

To claim that something is healthy, a food must have no more than 1 gram of saturated fat per serving and contain no more than 15 percent of its calories from saturated fat.

Technically, you could include some of these Kind bars in your daily macro goals, even on keto — but they're by no means healthy. They don't belong in your diet if you don't want to consume more than half of your carbs and sugar for the day in a tiny bar without real nutritional substance.

Not only are they healthy snacks, but they are specialty snacks for a specialty market, so that adds to the price. With the lowest priced bar ringing in at $1.00, KIND bars are on the low end for most energy bars. To produce a gold-standard nutritious snack using just 6 simple ingredients, it cost $1.23 per bar.

When dampened, chia seeds gel and swell to several times their original size, plus they get very sticky. Since they're already used as egg alternatives in baking, it's not surprising that chia seeds act as the ideal granola binder, but it is strange that they do it better than eggs.

If your granola bars are falling apart or seem too crumbly, here are a few tips. Make sure you use honey or another sticky sweetener such as maple syrup in the liquid part of the recipe; this recipe calls for honey. This will help bind together the ingredients and keep that signature bar shape.

Honey: Since it's a granola bar, refined sugar is not used in the recipe as it's meant to be healthy. So to provide appropriate sweetness, honey is used. Also, honey acts as the primary binding agent.

It's actually just a scientific process called “chocolate bloom”. There are two types of this bloom: sugar bloom and fat bloom. Sugar bloom happens when moisture comes in contact with the chocolate - it dissolves the sugar crystals on the chocolate's surface, leaving a white, powdery look.

Almonds are frequently used as a main ingredient in KIND bars, while peanuts, cashews and pecans are other popular additions. These nuts are particularly high in monounsaturated fats, which qualify as a “healthy fat.” Monounsaturated fats help reduce blood pressure and protect against heart disease.

Do KIND bars have nuts? ›

We have multiple product lines that do not have nuts added to the recipes. Bear in mind that all our products are made in a facility that processes tree nuts, peanuts, soy and sesame.

"Of all the nut butters, walnut butter has the most omega-3 fatty acids," Andrea says. The healthful fat ratio helps lower LDL cholesterol, increase HDL cholesterol, and reduce inflammation. The hitch: Walnut butter is lower in protein and fiber than other nut butters.

We don't use high fructose corn syrup and you'll never find artificial sweeteners or added sugar alcohols in our snacks, since they go against our philosophy of using premium, better-for-you ingredients that are KIND® to your body.

Sugar -- 5-10 grams per bar, or less than 10 grams per 100 grams. Fibre -- more.