Latest neat food discovery: cacao nibs

[johnpalmer]

I can, of course, have chocolate, any time, so long as I'm willing to exercise right afterward to burn off the sugar. But then one day I had this crazy idea, and ordered a bunch of cacao nibs. Cacao nibs are bits of cacao bean; they're very high fiber (10grams carb, 9 grams of which is fiber!), and high in fat (which has minimal effect on blood sugar. They're full of neat antioxidants and possibly-happy-making-chemicals.

They can be mixed in greek yogurt, or in a porridge made of wheat bran and germ. They're kinda-sorta-okay just crunched up, but they're a bit gritty. I'm thinking of adding them to some lentil dishes, just to see what they do when cooked for more than the 5-10 minutes that I give my porridge.

They contain chromium, and I don't know how much, but they're a 23,854x taste improvement over brewer's yeast as a chromium source.

What's really neat is that they're not that expensive, if you don't buy 'em in little plastic containers at Whole Foods. There are places that sell them around $10 a pound... not quite in the "snack on 'em like peanuts" range, but enough to use them in a few recipes.

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Try sprinkling them on salads - surprisingly good, in a "this is kind of like nuts but ... different" sort of way.

Next time I come up, I mayu make you take me to Whole Paycheck so I can stock up, since Trader Joe's seems to have stopped carrying them. )-: