How to make your own energy gel.

Energy gel was a revolution for athletes everywhere. Unfortunately, gels aren’t exactly light on the wallet. At $1.25 per gel, the costs can add up quickly. Our recipe comes in at a fraction of the cost of commercial energy gels.

I’ve been looking for a cheaper alternative to energy gels for a few years now. Judging by the ingredients in brands like GU, Hammer Gel, CLIF Shot, and Carb BOOM, it wouldn’t be too difficult to replicate a reasonable clone of the products at home. I had tried the other recipes on the web, but didn’t like the results. So, I decided to start experimenting on my own. For my first recipe, I wanted something based on a fruit juice to be as natural as possible.

Aside from the cost savings, why should you bother making your own energy gel? I like to be able to tailor a gel to exactly how I like it. Even though I like many of the gels on the market, none of them are perfect. There are some flavors I’d like to make that I can’t get from a commercial source. By making my own gel, I can change the thickness and flavor to exactly what I like.

Total time: 20-30 minutes

Ingredients:

500ml Apple Juice
250g Maltodextrin
3 1/2 tsp Powdered pectin
1 tsp Ball brand Fruit-Fresh
Cinnamon to taste

Directions:

1. Boil the apple juice over medium heat until reduced by 50%.

2. Turn the heat down to low and slowly add the maltodextrin to the juice. If you add too much maltodextrin to the juice it will boil quickly and overflow the pan, so be very careful with this step and slowly add the maltodextrin.

3. Whisk the maltodextrin until it has completely dissolved. There will be a bit of foam floating on the top, but the liquid should look like apple juice.

4. Whisk in the Fruit-Fresh and the pectin and let simmer for another minute

5. Add as much cinnamon as you like and take the pan off the stove

6. Cool down the mixture and move it to the fridge to gel

This recipe results in 10-12 servings of gel that can be loaded into a gel flask. The flasks I have are from Ultimate Direction, but the flasks from Hydrapak are marginally more expensive but hold more gel and pack up much smaller.

So how does it taste? I think it’s a lot like apple pie filling without the chunks of apple. It’s pretty sweet, but over all it tastes pretty decent. The only strange thing I’ve noticed is that the gel will turn from apple juice colored to a cloudy white after a few days in the fridge. Taste is unaffected by the color change.

A note on the Fruit-Fresh in the recipe. I was looking for citric acid to use in the gel, and Ball brand Fruit-Fresh was all that was available. Fruit-Fresh contains citric acid and vitamin C, so it served the purpose I was looking for. Feel free to replace this with citric acid if that’s what you have available. In either case, you must include citric acid in this recipe. The citric acid serves to bring down the pH of the mixture so the pectin will work properly.

Depending how thick you like your gel, you might want to adjust the amount of pectin in the recipe. I’ve found that 3 1/3 teaspoons of pectin is roughly the thickness that I like.

Perhaps the hardest thing to source in this recipe is the maltodextrin. Depending how much of it you want to buy, it can be fairly cheap. Search bodybuilding websites and you should be able to find it in bulk. The product I bought was called ‘Carbo Gain’ by NOW Foods.

Keep an eye out for our next article in this series. I’m going to be trying to make gel using commercial flavor extracts instead of a juice. This should allow a much wider range of flavors that you can split in smaller batches should you get tired of a single flavor.