Save money #7 don't be afraid to alter recipes

 

Disclaimer while this works for cooking it's not always suitable for baking where ratios are more important.

A few years ago my sister had a Hello fresh meal-kit subscription. For those that don't know each meal-kit includes apart from ingredients also a recipe sheet. My sister saved the recipes with the thought of recreating the dishes later and soon found herself with a large stack of them. Realizing that she wasn't going to use them she let me pick out the ones I might like to try before throwing the rest of them out. I've made some of them but doing so I have realized that most of them asks for unnecessarily expensive ingredients. It's nothing big just things like consistently using pointed cabbage (29,9 kr/kg) instead of normal cabbage (19,9 kr/kg) even though having tried both I honestly cant tell any difference once it's cut up and cooked.

Ant that's the thing once an ingredient is cut up, cooked, seasoned and combined with other ingredients most minor differences will have disappeared. So you might as well chose the option that you already have at home or that's cheapest. I've compiled a list of things that cam easily replace each other.

Any kind of bean with any other kind of bean.

Spinach, cavolo nero, kale or any other leafy green thing.

Cauliflower with broccoli.

Cream fresh, ricotta and yogurt. (just double check if it's meant to be cooked that it won't split)

Tahini with peanut butter.

When I defrosted my freezer I found two leftover hamburger-buns (because they never sell them in the same amount as the burgers) they became garlic-bread.

In general things in the same biological family mostly works. So just experiment.

Baking with protein powder try 1

Because of reasons I bought a packet of protein powder and now I'm trying to find different ways to incorporate it into food. this is my first try of making cookies with it.

 A bit of a caveat before I begin.

1 this is not a finished recipe it's me documenting my experiment. 

2 this is not meant to help anyone lose weight just increase the amount of protein in their diet. It's cookies they contain way to much sugar to ever be considered healthy

I did this experiment using a unflavored pea protein powder. I have no idea if it's the best or even good but it was on sale which is good enough for a first attempt. 

To start with I used this chocolate chip cookie recipe as a base.

4 dl Flour

6 dl Oatmeal

150g Butter (room temperature)

1 dl Muscovado sugar (very dark brown sugar)

1 dl Sugar

2 tsp baking powder

3 tbsp light syrup

110g Milk and dark chocolate

1/2- 1 dl water or until it is possible to roll it our without it crumbling too much

How many cookies depends on the size I made them roughly Oreo sized and got 60.

Preheat the oven to 200 (Celsius) and mix all the ingredients. Roll out out the dough approximately 1 cm thick and cut out with cookie cutters. Place the cookies on parchment paper, they can be placed fairly close. Lower the temperature to 175 and place in oven for 10-15. Leave them to cool before eating.

What I did

I was interested in weather replacing the flour or oats with protein powder would yield the best results.

So I mixed all the ingredients except flour, oats, baking soda and the water. Baking soda because it should be mixed with flour to avoid clumps and water because I anticipated having to change the amount to get the right consistency. That done I set it to the side

I had decided to do four test batches so I found four (in hindsight too small) bowls and filled all with 1/4 the rest of the ingredients with alteration according to each batch.

control                       Batch 1                       Batch 2                      Batch 3

1 flour                        1 protein powder        1 protein powder       1 protein powder

1,5 oats                     1,5 oats                      0,5 dl flour                 1 flour

0,5 tsp baking soda   0,5 tsp baking soda   1 dl oats                     0,5 oats

                                                                     0,5 tsp baking soda   0,5 tsp baking soda

Then I mixed in 1/4 of the butter sugar mix in each batch before following the recipe as usual. Rolling the dough out, using cookie cutters, placing on parchment paper and baking in the oven.

Per batch they are approximately 30g of protein or 2 g/cookie for my size.

Top left control, Top right batch 1,
 Bottom left batch 2 and bottom right is batch 3.

Lessons 

1. Don't start experimenting at 8 pm after along day at work. It's not really relevant to this experiment just more general life advice.
2. Pea protein has a distinct taste and with a neutral dough that becomes more noticeable. Picking a cookie with a solid flavor like ginger, cardamom or chocolate would be better than the chocolate chip I used. This might not have been a problem with a different kind of protein powder.
3. The pea protein gave a more crumbly feel to the cookies and none of them melt together like the control did. An increase in the amount of butter might help.
4. Batch number 1 was most best liked among my test subjects with batch 2 a close second. 

Next time solid flavor and more butter using batch 1 for my protein ratio.