Hemp Hearts

[Chef Kenny]

Low Carb cooking, especially baking requires stocking the pantry with a lot of ingredients most people dont use. In my case it required purging my pantry to replace most of our baking goods, giving away most of the high carb stuff we we used to eat, and replacing that shelf space with new, mostly healthier and much more expensive items.

I am always about dual or multi-use things, so buying an expensive ingredient for an experiment recipe that I may not like and never make again really pains me. But, I have found crossover uses for some of these ingredients...whey protein is one of those ingredients for instance.

My wife bought these hemp hearts to make this recipe from Buttoni's collection (who were are hoping will be allowed to link her own stuff here).

These hemp hearts are very good and have a nutty flavor. We sprinkled some on salads last night and I was really impressed with the flavor. This product is literally carb neutral. 1 gram carbs-1 gram fiber=zero in the Atkins formula! They are high in protein and have some really good nutrients (you can see the nutes panel on the Walmart web site)

The packaging pretty much suggests sprinkle-in/over kinds of uses, but that cookie recipe has them baked in as a dry ingredient. I'll bet these are going to catch on in the health food/diet market...or have...hey, maybe thats why they are available at Walmart! Duh!

By the way, the chia chai chewies came out very good. There are a LOT of ingredients in that recipe but fortunately many of them we already had; we only had to get the prunes, some of the chai spices, the hemp hearts...and stunningly Walmart here actually sells sugar free honey, an ingredient Peggy says is essential to these being chewy. I already stocked the other ingredients due to other low-carb recipes.

I recommend this sweetener for granulated uses. Erythritol is good, much better than most others, but this sucralose/erythritol combo is darned near the flavor of real sugar.

Liquid sucralose is best for liquid sweeteners for my palate. I haven't seen the combination in liquid form though...I'd buy it in a heartbeat if I did find it. Just last year I still proclaimed I would not eat artificial sweeteners, but eliminating sugar is not only good for our bodies, its essential for low carb diets. These two sweeteners fill that void for me as I really dont like most others, including stevia, which is natural...but doesn't taste like it!


Anyone familiar with Hemp Hearts and have any other ideas for its use?

 

[blissful]

My BF has mentioned hemp and hemp hearts, I'm sure to feel me out to see if I've looked into them. She is very health conscious and she explores new foods and exercise routines, weekly. If I saw them on the grocery store shelf, I'd give them a try.


A lot of these keto friendly foods are nutritiously dense and cost a bit more, yep.

 

[Kitchen Barbarian]

I feed them to my birds. Otherwise have never found a use for them.

They're low carb but the main usage for them in people food seems to be (nasty) "smoothies" or (nasty) salad dressing, except when they are being used to "pump up" the protein in sugary floury deserts like brownies. The ONLY recipe I've ever found that I might have been willing to give a shot was for a pasta topping - and I can't have pasta. If you need low carb, pouring something low carb over something high carb is not going to get you to your desired goals.

 

[Chef Kenny]

Wow! Replies!



K.B., your birds have expensive tastes!



Some of the shakes, smoothies, etc. in much of "health food" IS nasty, I agree. I dont like salad dressings with a lot of texture and cant imagine putting something like hemp hearts in them. My only two experiences are a sprinkle on topping for salad (I suppose that does mean they mingled with the dressing) which like I wrote, I thought was remarkably good, and those cookie/chews I mentioned.


The only reason we have them, as with many other new and expensive pantry ingredients, is they ware part of a recipe. In this case it was a recipe my wife wnated to try. I'm always trying to find other uses for stuff we buy specifically for a recipe. My wife has been adding either sunflower seeds, chia seeds and sometimes even flax meal to some of her foods such as salads and wraps. she's following the zero sugar diet which advises such practices.


If you are low carb, you may want to look at that chew/cookie recipe. The link is that blue underlined "this" in my original post. They are pretty good. You cant really tell they are in there, but i'm sure they are adding a good flavor.