This recipe came out of attempts to make my soylent taste better. Some background. For a long time I was using maltodextrin as my only carbohydrate source. I think this made the drink a little thin and unsatisfying. Unfortunately, adding oat powder (as is usually done) does a lot to hurt the texture, in my opinion.

Soaking the drink for a long time reduces some of the "oatiness," in a positive way. It also presumably deactivates some of the phytic acid. J_Jeffrey_Bragg, on the soylent forums, suggests going further and actually cooking the oats (and in his case the other grains, since his recipe uses multiple grains). He thinks that this not only deactives more of the phytic acid, but also transforms the carbohydrates to be more digestible.

He goes so far as to suggest that eating uncooked oats is just a very silly thing to do. That is one of those things that seems very obvious in retrospect to me. So I was thinking that either I ought to cook my oats before I put them in the soylent, or I ought to dispense with oats (and any cereal grains, for the same reasons).

Right now I am preparing for a new living situation in which I won't have the ability to cook food; so that option is out the window for me. Thinking about alternatives to oats, almond flour occurred to me as a good one. Almonds can serve a function in soylent similar to that of oats, providing some carbs, fat, protein, and fiber, as well as minerals, and in particular the "tricky" minerals such as phosphorous, magnesium, and manganese. Plus, they are delicious!

Unfortunately almonds don't provide enough fiber by themselves. Fiber is tricky, because most fiber supplements I've tried have an unpleasant taste and/or texture. To solve this issue, I thought to try dextrin. Dextrin is a fiber which dissolves completely in water and is tasteless. Perfect, from a culinary standpoint. From a health standpoint it seems imperfect, because dextrin is all soluble fiber, and we probably also want some insoluble fiber. Conveniently, the fiber in almonds is mostly insoluble.

A few more tricks bring the taste and texture the rest of the way home. Following the hacker school soylent recipe, we use soy lecithin as an emulsifier (and a choline source). Also following the hacker schoool soylent, we let some of the carbs be sugar, for flavor. (You can substitute stevia if you don't want sugar.) We add a bit of cinnamon and vanilla.

It may look like the chloride is short in this recipe; but I think that most of the ingredients that contain sodium actually contain salt, and thus contain chloride, though it is not listed in the nutrition facts. So I think the chloride isn't actually short.

I actually want to say that you should put in a teaspoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon of vanilla, but the software doesn't let me say that.