Rice cakes, bars and gels you can make at home for a tenth of the price

A box of six shop-bought rice cakes costs about what a kilo of rice, a jar of honey and a bunch of bananas cost together, and that kilo of rice makes several dozen. Commercial gels are roughly a euro or two each; the maple syrup that goes into a home-made batch works out at pennies a portion. Those price comparisons are our own supermarket arithmetic, not a study, but the gap is wide enough that the exact figure hardly matters. The real question is whether the cheap version does the same job on the bike. For carbohydrate delivery, the evidence says yes. Where it loses is convenience, and we will be honest about that.

What the food actually has to do

Ride food has one job: put carbohydrate into your blood at a rate your gut can handle. The current consensus is roughly 30 g an hour for rides of one to two hours, 60 g an hour for two to three, and up to 90 g an hour beyond that, with the top end only reachable if the carbohydrate is a mix of glucose and fructose, because the two sugars use different transporters in the gut wall. Jentjens and Jeukendrup showed the mixed-sugar drink oxidised at up to about 1.7 g a minute against roughly 1.1 g for glucose alone, and Currell's group found a glucose-plus-fructose drink improved a time trial by about 8% over glucose only.

None of that is specific to a wrapper. Pfeiffer's lab compared a solid carbohydrate bar against a drink at the same dose and found the bar oxidised at essentially the same rate. The gut does not know whether the sugar arrived in foil or greaseproof paper. What matters is the grams, the sugar mix, and whether the other things in the food (fat, fibre, protein) slow it down or upset you. Our post on carbs per hour covers the targets in more detail; this one is about making the food.

Where the carbohydrate numbers come from

Every carbohydrate figure below is the "carbohydrate, by difference" value from USDA FoodData Central, SR Legacy entries, per 100 g. The recipe quantities are ours. If you weigh differently, scale the maths.

Rice cakes: the pro-peloton classic

Our batch: 600 g cooked white rice (cook 200 g dry rice wetter than you would for dinner, so it sticks), 60 g honey, 100 g mashed ripe banana, a pinch of salt. Mix while the rice is hot, press into a lined tin about 2 cm deep, chill overnight, cut into eight and wrap each in foil or greaseproof paper.

• Carbohydrate. 600 g rice gives 169 g; 60 g honey gives 49 g; 100 g banana gives 23 g. Total about 241 g, so roughly 30 g per cake at 95 g each. Two cakes an hour hits the 60 g target.
• Why it works. Rice is almost pure starch, which the gut breaks to glucose; honey adds fructose, so you get some of the mixed-transporter benefit without buying anything special.
• What does not work. Brown rice. The fibre is exactly what you do not want mid-ride, and the cakes fall apart. Also, rice cakes are heavy and damp; in a hot back pocket they go from pleasant to grim in about four hours, and they will not survive a week in a saddle bag. Make them the night before.
• Variations. Swap the banana for 50 g of jam, or add a spoon of cocoa. Savoury versions with a little soy sauce and egg are popular but the protein slows digestion, so keep them for easier rides.

Oat and date bars: the one that survives a week

Our batch: 150 g rolled oats, 200 g pitted medjool dates, 60 g honey, 50 g raisins, a pinch of salt and enough hot water (about 40 ml) to let the dates blend to a paste. Blitz the dates, honey and water, stir in oats and raisins, press hard into a tin, bake at 170°C for about 15 minutes, cool fully before cutting into ten.

• Carbohydrate. Oats 102 g, dates 150 g, honey 49 g, raisins 40 g. Around 341 g in the tin, so roughly 34 g a bar.
• Why it works. Dates and raisins are mostly sugar, oats are starch, and the bar is dry enough to keep for a week in a tin and to sit in a jersey pocket without turning to paste.
• What does not work. Oats bring fibre, and dates bring a fair dose of fructose without much glucose alongside. For some riders that combination means bloating at high intensity. Test them on training rides, and treat the first hour of a hard event as gel territory rather than bar territory. If you add nut butter for flavour, know that the fat slows gastric emptying; Jeukendrup's review of gut training lists fat, fibre and protein as the things to trim from race-day food.

Gels: syrup, honey, salt, water

This is the one where the saving is largest and the recipe simplest. Our mix: 100 g maple syrup, 40 g honey, a small pinch of salt (roughly an eighth of a teaspoon) and 20 to 30 ml of water to thin it so it flows from a soft flask. Warm it gently if it will not blend.

• Carbohydrate. Maple syrup 67 g, honey 33 g: about 100 g in a 160 ml flask, so a quarter of the flask is a 25 g "gel". A 150 ml soft flask holds four.
• Why it works. Honey is close to an even split of glucose and fructose; maple syrup is mostly sucrose, which the gut splits into the same two sugars. You end up with a mixed-transportable-carbohydrate gel without a laboratory.
• What does not work. It is stickier and sweeter than a commercial gel, and it has no thickener, so it will leak from anything that is not a proper flask. It also crystallises if kept cold for days. Make it the day before. And wash the flask the same evening, not the following week.
• Sodium. The pinch of salt is for taste and a token of sodium; it is not a hydration strategy. See our post on sweat and sodium for the numbers.

The honest comparison

Where home-made food loses is not physiology, it is logistics.

• Shelf life. Rice cakes last a day, bars a week, syrup a few days. A commercial gel lasts a year in a drawer. If you ride sporadically, the bought version wastes less.
• Weight and packaging. Two rice cakes weigh as much as five gels for the same carbohydrate. On a 200 km day that is noticeable pocket bulk.
• Precision. A commercial gel says 25 g on the packet and is 25 g. Your rice cake is 30 g on average; the corner piece is not. That only matters if you are chasing 90 g an hour in a race.
• Gut tolerance at intensity. Above threshold, solids sit. This is true of shop bars too, but it is worth saying: home-made does not fix it. The practical answer most riders settle on is real food for the first two-thirds of a ride and syrup or gels for the hard end.

What we would not do is treat "home-made" as a reason to skip planning. The numbers above only mean something if you actually eat two pieces an hour, and the most common failure on long rides is under-eating, not the wrong wrapper. If you use a plan from the Moveee plan wizard, the long-ride sessions carry a duration, and it is worth working out the grams for that duration the evening before, then packing one piece more than the sum. Our gut-training post explains how to work up to the higher intakes if 60 g an hour currently makes you queasy.