HOW TO MAKE RICE CAKES FOR ATHLETES
For athletes of all kinds but for endurance athletes in particular, rice cakes are nothing less than super snacks. They’re easy to make. They’re nutritious. And you can add all kinds of ingredients and flavors to them so that they never get boring.
You could sit in your dining room and savor a few rice cakes. Or you could devour some when you’re running on the trail — they’re easy to carry, chew, and swallow.
After you’ve been experimenting with these cakes for a while, you’re sure to find a few favorites.
For instance, one of the rice cakes we love best is a delicious concoction that includes blueberries, bananas, strawberries, whole organic cane sugar, shredded coconut, sushi rice, and — for that perfect finishing touch — a wee bit of lemon. It’s totally irresistible.
For sure, there are rice cakes for every taste and style. Some people, of course, prefer sweet cakes. Others crave a little crunch — and, for them, nuts and chocolate chips can be just right.
For ingredient ideas, you could always scour the internet. And we know of at least one book that’s dedicated to rice cake varieties.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to make these cakes for athletes or anyone else in need of healthy snacks. And we’ll talk about how to package them.
Preparing these foods with friends or loved ones can be a fun activity in itself. In fact, it can be almost as enjoyable as eating them — almost but not quite!
A Cornucopia of Tastes
When you’re making rice cakes, you could start by gathering all of your ingredients except for the rice.
For example, you could take out strawberries and blueberries along with a banana and a lemon. You could then cut the strawberries, slice the lemon, and dice the banana.
All of those items, except the lemon, can go right into your big mixing bowl. Next, you could squeeze several drops of lemon juice over the mix. The juice will give the batch a burst of citrusy goodness.
Another delectable idea is to take a Lärabar energy bar, a product from General Mills, and throw it into your blender. Then take the blended Lärabar and toss it into the mixing bowl. The energy bar remnants will provide extra calories, nutrients, flavor, and texture. Alternatively, if you don’t have any energy bars at home, nuts and dates are other options for your blender.
At this point, you might want to add a dash of coconut milk or almond milk so that the rice cakes will be even moister. That moisture will bind everything together more effectively.
If you’d like, you could now sprinkle shredded coconut and organic cane sugar onto the rest of your ingredients.
We only use a pinch of sugar in our rice cakes. It gives them an alluring hint of sweetness. Naturally, if your diet involves staying away from sugar, don’t worry about this step. Your rice cakes will be delicious enough without sugar.
Another thing you might add is a bit of Himalayan salt, which is a pink salt. Once again, it’s optional. But Himalayan salt is loaded with nutrients.
In particular, this type of salt is packed with electrolytes. Electrolytes are essential minerals that aid various bodily processes, including detoxification.
In any event, once you have all the ingredients you want, you can put your mixing bowl in your fridge and let everything chill.
Making the Rice
At last, it’s time to cook your rice.
When making rice, the two-to-one ratio is helpful. You’ll probably want two cups of water for each cup of sticky white rice. As for the actual cooking, the process is simple:
- Pour the water into your ricer.
- Throw in the cups of rice.
- Fire up your ricer.
- Press the cook button.
- Wait 15 minutes or so for the rice to cook.
Once the rice is done, take your mixing bowl out of the refrigerator. Pour the rice in right away.
You’ll want to mix everything together while the rice is still hot. That way, everything will marinate together properly. For optimal results, stir the mixture thoroughly.
With enough practice, you’ll become a stirring authority. That is, you’ll know how long and hard to stir in order to obtain a certain thickness. On top of that, the size of your batch will determine how long to stir for the texture you desire.
When the mixing is done, pour the contents of your bowl into a rectangular pan. Then flatten out and smooth the pan’s contents; it’s as though you were baking a cake.
Here you have one last chance to add an ingredient or two. For example, you could spread some nuts along the top or, to satisfy a sweet tooth, you could toss in a few chocolate chips.
You might stretch your imagination here and include bacon or another mouthwatering item. After all, they’re your rice cakes, and you only live once!
You can now put the mix in the refrigerator and let it cool for 30 minutes to an hour. And you might experiment with different timeframes to find out what works best for you.
Eventually, you might want to keep the mixture in your fridge for a whole day or even longer.
In any event, while your mixture is cooling, you have time to wash the dishes and clean the kitchen. Admittedly, it’s not the most fun part. But, if you imagine eating your rice cakes while you’re cleaning, it might make the work more pleasant.
That’s a Wrap
Fortunately, packaging rice cakes is another straightforward process. Here are the basic steps:
- Take your cooled rice cake mix out of the fridge.
- Set it down on your counter.
- Cut the mix into even squares.
- One at a time, remove those squares and place each of them on a piece of parchment paper.
- Fold the sides of the paper over each square.
An even more convenient option is to use paper from Skratch Labs, a leading sports nutrition company. Their paper for rice cakes is designed for easy packaging. And, when you fold the sides over, you get an attractive triangle shape.
Not to mention, Skratch Labs packaging paper comes with handy white stripes to label your batches. It is helpful when you’re eating more than one batch of rice cakes.
If you’d prefer, you could put your rice cakes inside 2oz dixie plastic cups. You’d just need to cut smaller squares to fit inside those cups. And you could scoop out those smaller squares with a rice spoon.
That should do it. At this point, you have a scrumptious snack that you could consume just about anywhere.
The Power of Rice Cakes
Why are rice cakes such outstanding foods for endurance athletes? For one thing, they’re an excellent source of carbohydrates. Carbs are organic compounds the body breaks down into sugar for energy.
In fact, that sugar goes right into the bloodstream and then straight to the cells. Some of the sugar is also stored in the muscles and liver in the form of glycogen, which the body utilizes for energy later on.
The main issue here for endurance athletes, though, is that the muscles don’t store much glycogen. Thus, they can run out of it after 90 minutes or so of exercise. And, when the glycogen supplies are gone, an athlete can start suffering from fatigue.
Carbohydrate loading, therefore, is a common strategy for endurance athletes. In the 24 to 72 hours before a major event, they consume more carb-laden foods. Plus, they take in extra carbs during their long bouts of running, swimming, cycling, and so forth.
Rice cakes are ideal for carb loading as they rarely cause gastrointestinal problems. Many other foods, when consumed in large quantities, can sometimes lead to gastrointestinal distress.
In addition to everything else, natural rice is gluten-free. Gluten is a protein that many grains contain. It has no nutritional value. Making things worse, in some people, it causes gastrointestinal irritation. It can also damage the small intestines of those who have an autoimmune disorder called celiac disease.
Furthermore, the medical evidence indicates that rice cakes can suppress feelings of thirst and hunger. In part, that’s because the air inside rice cakes can make you feel fuller. As a result, these snacks could satisfy your appetite while lessening the number of calories you consume.
Finally, we thought that we would end here by explaining how much rice cakes have meant to us personally — how they’ve impacted our athletic performance.
At one time, I (Tyler) was experiencing serious gastrointestinal issues whenever I competed in ultra events — athletic competitions lasting more than six hours at a time.
As a result, we started researching nutrition for endurance athletes, specifically foods that could help resolve these problems. Among the alternatives we found were rice cakes. Thus, we learned how to make rice cakes at home, and we tried making some batches.
After a while, lo and behold, my stomach issues went away. Eating rice cakes is also a great way for me to avoid sugar. We don’t miss sweets or even think about them when I have plenty of rice cakes to enjoy.
In short, I (Tyler) have no doubt that sugar was inflaming my GI problems. And I’m just as certain that rice cakes have boosted my athletic performances.
If pressed, Mimi would say that her favorite rice cake is peach shredded coconut. At the same time, we love many different types of rice cakes. And we keep alternating flavors because we really enjoy variety, especially when we are out on the trails for a long period of time.
In the end, of course, every endurance athlete is unique. As such, rice cakes are perfect for this group of competitors. There’s no right or wrong way to create one. Instead, once you know how to make rice cakes for athletes, you can listen to your palate. And you might come up with a special treat that’s all your own.
