The First Mix

Wheee! It's time! I've been crazy excited about the mad scientist part of this process for a while!!

So! Using my handy dandy food scale and a bevy of neato measuring tools (and a conversion app on my phone), I carefully started scooping small amounts of ingredients, one ingredient at a time, into a large measuring cup.

Amateur tip: tare your scale with the large measuring cup on it already.

Here, you can see that I'm using my Takeya 2L airtight pitchers that Soylent actually sends you with their starter kit. I bought these from Amazon for about $15 a piece and they're delightful. I added ingredients in order as they appear on my recipe and we're on the cocoa powder step here.

Speaking of cocoa powder, this stuff is pretty potent and I now understand why the original recipe was called Chocolate Silk. I will be investigating alternate flavoring options because DANG this thing is chocolatey. The Chocolate Peanut Butter whey isolate smells AMAZING and I'm a bit put out that the cocoa powder really covered up that yummy flavor. I seriously bought that whey flavor because I know perfectly well that I love Reese's cups and I could eat them at any time of the day- much like I'll need to be drinking my DIYS. But that's for later!

 It was like playing with sand art. But... better smelling (sometimes).

My scale was pretty serious about only showing whole amounts of grams, so I had to fudge sometimes on the half-measure ingredients and just hope that I was scooping them correctly. Should I enjoy this shake, I'll invest in a new scale.

Seriously. Sand-art. Adding the oil made me feel like I was at the beach.

So! Let's talk about the water amount. There are lots of suggestions as to how much water you want to add to this stuff. I know that the official Soylent utilizes the whole 2L container and followed that path. As it turns out, I should have added water a bit more progressively. 

Pro-tip: Unless you have a super long immersion blender, add water slowly. 

Unlike me, who went whole hog and had to hand mix for an hour.

My first bottle resisted mixing and the immersion blender that I bought, while perfect for that I need it to do (really!), does not actually reach the bottom of a full Takeya pitcher. I had to fight this thing with a spoon and alternated between giggling like a maniac and cursing like a sailor. Yep, that's me- maniac sailor.

Yummy, right?

This is the mix right when I pull the immersion blender out of it. The mix smells like yoohoo and takes a while to get to a decent consistency. 

This is the same mix about 20 seconds later. Yeeeeeaaahhh. That's a lot of sediment. That's okay- there's a reason why I'm making this at night and letting it set in the fridge overnight. There are lots of forum posts that mention "grit" in their Soylent recipes and one of the recommendations was to let the stuff soak overnight. I also plan on putting the MASA in my mini food blender by itself to help break it down further; from what I gather, this is the source of the grit. I'll make sure to post on how the texture is when I have it for breakfast!

Time for batch #2! I was adding ingredients to the two containers at the same time because I have a final tomorrow night and will have essentially zero time to come home and make another one of these bad boys. So, two days of food in one go? Check. Learning from my blue container mixing, I added only a slight amount of water and then started blending from there.

And guess what? IT LOOKED AND SMELLED LIKE DELICIOUS, DELICIOUS BROWNIE MIX.

At this point, I was sorely tempted to lick the spoon. Texture, movement, EVERYTHING my senses could pick up told me that this was brownie mix. It was heavenly. I resisted and continued onward to add a slightly lesser amount of water than the blue container. Consistency stayed the same but, hey, if the mix sucks, I won't have to down quite as much of it.

My true (current) recommendation for water quantity is to just get a good feel for exactly how much of this you want to put away during the day. I should have added less water to begin with in case I didn't want it to be thin. Well, that's okay... it's all about learning!!

I took baseline measurements yesterday and today so I'll be adding another downloadable chart with my numbers as they are taken. Taste updates due tomorrow!! Yay! Also, I'll let you know if my energy levels plummet so hard on Day 1 that I end up failing my test.