Ben's Journal: Noshing on the Go - Part 3: Ben Bites to the Rescue

Thursday, August 07, 2025

Noshing on the Go - Part 3: Ben Bites to the Rescue

Finding nutritionally optimized, on-the-go meals is tricky. This video by @FandabiDozi offers an interesting DIY solution. I wondered: could I use the same approach, but optimize for my macros instead of focusing primarily on carbohydrates and fat?

The short answer: yes. It's taken a handful of attempts to craft a recipe that hits my macros and tastes palatable, but the result has been surprisingly effective.

I give you, Ben Bites*

The Recipe

Here's version 8 of my Ben Bites recipe.

Ingredients

(For a single serving)

Directions

Preheat oven to 350°F
Whisk together ingredients scaled to the total number of servings you wish to make
Slowly add warm water to form a dough ball
Divide the dough ball into the number of intended servings
Divide each serving into 4 small blobs of dough
Roughly shape each blob into a hockey puck
Bake for 12 minutes
Flip and bake for an additional 5 minutes

Once cooled, I've been freezing all but one serving. The lone serving is stashed in the fridge for quick deployment.

Packaging

Inspired by FandabiDozi's original video, I wanted to avoid using single-use packaging when bringing a serving of Ben Bites on the road. I found that tying them in a cloth napkin bundle works superbly:

This trades single-use packaging for what is effectively a multi-purpose wonder tool.

What's Inside

Like FandabiDozi's recipe, I was originally intending to keep Ben Bites super simple: combine wheat flour, peanuts, and pea-protein powder with water to form a dough; bake.

Wheat flour brings the carbohydrates and a bit of protein. It's both easy for me to digest and has been a staple food for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Peanuts bring the fat and also contribute protein. I was originally going to use oil as a fat source, but peanuts are a whole food, so using them adds more nutrition than a processed oil. Finally, pea-protein rounds out the protein need. According to my research, pea-protein is considered a complete and high-quality source of protein.

Because each ingredient contributes one macro nutrient, it's easy to tune the recipe to hit your goals. For example, need more protein and fewer carbs? Dial up the pea-protein and down the flour.

There was only one problem with my plan: the resulting Ben Bites were nearly inedible. It's hard to nail down their flavor: sort of earthy and blah. Whatever it was, it wasn't good.

Version 8 of the recipe uses additional ingredients to make the resulting bites far more tasty. I've replaced some of the pea-protein with peanut powder and swapped some of the flour with oats and sugar. I used turbinado sugar because that's what I had in our pantry. Any sweetener—white sugar, honey, maple syrup, etc.—would probably do just fine.

How'd I do?

Ben Bites hit my macros and meet a basic taste threshold. But that's only part of the story. I want to have them check my on-the-go criteria, too.

Stageable? Yes. I can make a large batch of Ben Bites and put most of them in the freezer. I keep one serving in the fridge, where it can be grabbed and wrapped in a few seconds.
Portable? Indeed. Ben Bites are very easy to bring along. They don't crumble or melt, and the cloth napkin they are wrapped in takes up minimal space once they're eaten.
Consumable? You betcha. I've eaten Ben Bites everywhere from at my desk during meetings to walking home from the gym to nibbling while at the wheel of my car. The 4 pucks that make up a serving are easy to portion out and munch on anywhere.

In short, Ben Bites hit both their nutritional and functional goals. Hurray!

It's worth noting that while Ben Bites hit my macro targets, I've made no attempt for them to be a source of complete nutrition. That means that if I attempted to eat only Ben Bites, I'd quickly run into vitamin and other deficiencies. Hello scurvy. Thankfully, they are not intended to be the only thing I eat, so this limitation isn't a problem for me.**

But Are They Useful?

Ben Bites were born out of a nearly academic thought exercise. It doesn't really matter if the food I grab while I'm on the go hits my macro targets or not. And yet, I've found them to be an incredibly practical tool. In short, they are a sort of meal-based Get Out Of Jail Free Card. When I find myself in a situation where I should eat something, but I've got no time to prepare anything, much less a quality meal, Ben Bites have been an excellent option.

I get the benefits of a real meal with zero effort.

I suspect my macro based eating experiment will one day be replaced with another strategy. And yet, I expect I'll still continue to make and munch on Ben Bites, even after that happens. They're just too useful.

*I had intended to name my creation something more descriptive, like Macro Bricks or Meal Blocks. But, every time I described what I was eating to others, I kept calling them Ben Bites. So yeah, I guess that's what they are.

**While looking for an example of a food that does try to contain complete nutrition I found myself over at huel.com. Interestingly, their powder recipe has effectively the same macro profile as Ben Bites. Nice.

Ben's Journal