Grow! Hot Chocolate

Anybody tried making hot chocolate from Low-Carb Grow!? How about brownies, cakes, etc? How does extreme heat (oven temps, boiling water) effect the protein?

DB

Ha!Ha! gets asked twice a week!!!

Yes, heating denatures protein but some here don’t care. Personally, since Grow! is a staple of mine i will continue with my “food issue” and not waste my money by denaturing it.

If you want good hot chocolate use unsweetened good quality coco powder - skim milk and sweeten it with stevia or any other sweetener you wish. Froothe the milk like you would for a latte.

Yummeee if you ask me.

Don’t waste your Grow! Biotest has gone to great lengths (so they say) to not heat it so as to preserve the micellar protein so why screw it up?

My wife makes Grow! hot chocolate all the time. It’s delicious and does not harm the protein at all.

Just mix one scoop Low-Carb Grow! with 8 oz. Hood Carb Countdown milk and a touch of whipped cream.

Why then has Biotest gone to such great lengths to NOT heat the micellar protein if heating has no effect on it? Something just doesn’t add up. Can I suggest you and TC have a talk since he wrote the article or is it an advertisement - well, same thing.

It might be good to get you and he on the same page on this.

Furthermore Chris, in a T-nation article published in April, 02, J. Berardi wrote when describing his fav. protein pudding:

" Also, it’s important that you don’t try to make protein
pudding with the pudding that needs to be cooked; cooking will denature the protein."

Now, why would he put this warning regarding heating protein if heating doesn’t change the protein at all?

Now I am an architect so I know it is impossible to get two architects in the same room and expect them to agree on anything - but, this?!?!?!? wooooo you guys have a forum up top why not use it.

There’s a difference between cooking it for a long period of time and simply mixing it with hot water, which is not “cooking it.”

This is why Grow! hot chocolate is fine and so is mixing Grow! into hot oatmeal. But, just to be safe, I would not mix it into oatmeal and then cook it. Likewise, when used for hot chocolate, you get the water or milk hot first, then mix protein into it. You do not boil it already mixed.

I believe Berardi got into the finer points of the denaturing issue in a past article of his. The theme was basically that people worry too much about this. They think the protein is “destroyed” when cooked, when in truth only some of the properties are changed.

That doesn’t mean you should cook with it, that’s still best avoided, but you also shouldn’t wet the bed over mixing Grow! into a hot liquid or food, which will not hurt or “change” it at all.

Thanks Chris and Gonta.
I was wondering about this issue because I recall that John Berardi uses Low-Carb Grow! in some of his baked recipes (ex. granola bars, bran muffins). I’m perfectly happy with taking my Low-Carb Grow! as a shake or in pudding form, but the hot chocolate sounded like another way to add a little protein and since this is winter, a little Grow! hot chocolate sounded good. I’ll give it a try.

Thanks,
DB

[quote]gonta wrote:
Furthermore Chris, in a T-nation article published in April, 02, J. Berardi wrote when describing his fav. protein pudding:

" Also, it’s important that you don’t try to make protein
pudding with the pudding that needs to be cooked; cooking will denature the protein."

Now, why would he put this warning regarding heating protein if heating doesn’t change the protein at all?

Now I am an architect so I know it is impossible to get two architects in the same room and expect them to agree on anything - but, this?!?!?!? wooooo you guys have a forum up top why not use it.
[/quote]

I don’t know if there’s really any need to be rude. In Berardi’s brand new cookbook he lists several recipes in which you bake protein bars for 15 min or so. Given that he eats these, I can’t imagine that it would destroy the integrity of the protein to any noticable extent.

RIT Jared

Good lord in heaven… its another freaking denaturing question.

Ohmygawd… eat your entire cannister of Grow! as soon as it arrives… it will spontaneously combust due to denaturing into toxic combustible gases (at room temperature yet) if you don’t.

Alternately, try SEARCHING for previous threads that ask this question about a zillion times. Sigh.

I did look around a bit and even mentioned having done so. I guess I just like to annoy you Vroom, knowing full-well that you can’t stay away from posting no matter how many times idiots like me ask;)

DB

[quote]vroom wrote:
Good lord in heaven… its another freaking denaturing question.

Ohmygawd… eat your entire cannister of Grow! as soon as it arrives… it will spontaneously combust due to denaturing into toxic combustible gases (at room temperature yet) if you don’t.

Alternately, try SEARCHING for previous threads that ask this question about a zillion times. Sigh.[/quote]

Well, yes, it was all the way down to page two of this forum… :stuck_out_tongue:

http://www.t-nation.com/readTopic.do?id=541447

For a more serious answer, I think that people worry too much about this denaturing issue. If the protein lost its micellar nature via cooking, it would mean you could not count on it to take so long to digest.

So, when using it to cover an extended time period, such as before bed, I’d recommend using it relatively raw, just in case.

However, I don’t imagine you have to worry about cooking in any other real way – we’ve cooked just about all of our proteins for centuries now and we’ve done just fine.