I got a bag of each unsweetened and vanilla to start for Huel. Quickly discovered I cannot stand the taste of the unsweetened Huel no matter how I have tried it. The only way I’ve been able to use it is adding 1 scoop unsweetened into 2 scoops of vanilla. So I decided to just work with vanilla for later shipments.
For the most part, I got Huel to be an easy meal to take to work so in some ways, not liking adding things to my Huel isn’t too much of a problem. I haven’t gotten tired of drinking vanilla Huel, but I’m worried it will happen eventually so I’m looking for suggestions. Some ones that take more prep are fine as I am likely also going to start replacing a second meal with Huel.
I am not a coffee drinker so while I sometimes will add some instant coffee to my Huel, it’s not great, but it’s more enjoyable than anything else I’ve tried. The only one that I’ve added in and really enjoyed was canned pumpkin with pumpkin pie spice to be a pumpkin pie huel, but that’s not easy to do when you’re at work except just doing the pumpkin pie spice. I tried berries this morning and had to chug it down quickly to just get it down. The berry flavor did not seem to transfer to the vanilla Huel at all and just made it taste funky (even tried letting it sit in the fridge for a little while). I have tried adding unsweetened cocoa powder and some of the other suggestions in the Huel booklet that comes with the first package. They all tasted gross to me.
Has anyone else experienced this? Enjoying just the vanilla Huel, but cannot enjoy it with added flavors? I want to try out the chai recipe next. I really enjoy chai and I’m hoping that since it has a similar “spice” palate to pumpkin pie that it will also be enjoyable. I’ve tried milk thinking a creamy vanilla would be nice and I couldn’t stand the taste.
To be further clear, I am not a picky person when it comes to regular food (I am not afraid to try things), but I am struggling with the taste of flavored Huel beyond vanilla because it doesn’t seem to taste like the flavor I’m expecting.
I think mashed potatoes are too boring to be edible on their own, so i add butter and garlic and pepper and sometimes other mixins.
Why do people think Huel should be one note every time? I also don’t know why people think we must mouth feel it like a merlot vs cabernet. If you add enough water so you can just drink it down, you really are just fueling rather than having a culinary experience.
I’m fine with drinking the vanilla as is, I just don’t want to end up getting bored of it. I want to enjoy other flavors just like I do with regular solid food. However, my experience so far has been that the flavor of Huel has not mixed well with other things that I’ve added to flavor it. Not sure why. I’ve followed many different recipes that I’ve found and to me it ends up tasting bad, some so bad that I can’t just chug it down simply to not waste the Huel. I’d like to find the butter and garlic and other “toppings” that I enjoy to put in my Huel so I’m looking for suggestions especially if someone has had a similar experience to me.
I don’t mind the texture of Huel. The closest the texture affected me was with the unsweetened Huel and that was only because the lack of any flavor made it seem like I was trying to drink a slurry of chalk. I attempted to add things to add flavor to it, but it still made me think “chalk with yuck,” but I have no problem with the vanilla. I just seem to ruin the flavor if I add things to vanilla. I don’t need it to be an exquisite culinary experience, but I do enjoy food so I’d just like to have some variety and not just chug it down to refuel.
I found the vanilla too sweet. @Deron was initially very vocal about the … unpalatable UU, but after a bunch of mixins he admits it’s pretty versatile.
I don’t have advice for what to mix in vanilla.
I do advise trying just about anything in the spice rack. Pumpkin pie spice, apple pie spice, cinnamon, ginger, curry, instsnt coffee (or use real coffee instead of water) you can use extracts, though some are chemically. Drink powders like matcha, chai, cocoa, or the various crystal light (also food science fakery) i know Mio has liquid water additives. I found some popcorn flavoring powder that’s easy to sprinkle in (really next-level food science fakery)
Walden farms has since sugar free syrups that I really like in Huel: caramel, chocolate, i never tried the strawberry
Maple syrup is pretty awesome too, but it would have a higher glycemic impact and maybe be disgusting in the already sweetened vanilla, but it’s good in UU.
Also, consider mixing with premade beverages. Orange juice with vanilla Huel is yuck, but you can try a whole bunch of V8 (traditional, tropical, berry, etc.) or Welches, or try the various alt-milk flavors.
Keep trying things. Let me know if you figure out the recipe for a decent pizza Huel.
Sweet:
Ice cream
Peanut Butter
Nutella, cocoa powder (you said not a fan)
Honey
Cinnamon (as suggested)
Milk/almond milk/coconut milk
Coconut oil/
if you have a blender you could even add something as “unhealthy” as a mars bar or snickers
Fruity
Banana
berry
Straberry
Kiwi
mango
pear
Apple
(anything that will make it resemble a smoothie, get a recipie and add huel)
Salty
30g unflavoured huel
1 tesco chicken stock pot
10g peanut butter
1tsp of curry powder
Couple of drops of Tabasco
Pepper (this sounds gross to me but…)
I too once ordered the unflavored version with a pack of Cocoa power flavoring thinking it was going to be the most awesome thing, Cocoa flavored huel?! What could go wrong.
Everything! Unflavored by itself was gross and the 1st time, I added too much Cocoa powder that it was disgusting and I ended throwing it away.
Sticking to Vanilla flavor for sure.
I add 2 tablespoons of different flavors of Coffee mate. Since I drink coffee in the morning, I’ll switch up my coffeemate flavors. I have really enjoyed the mixture of Vanilla flavored huel with Southern Pecan coffemate or even French Vanilla with Vanilla flavored huel. There’s a ton of Coffemate flavors so you can’t really go wrong.
@Archangeldawn
I didn’t think of coffee creamers. Does it make it too sweet? Granted, I don’t drink coffee so I don’t tend to use creamer. I have a pretty sweet tooth, but after cutting the vanilla with unflavored for a while, I noticed full vanilla started tasting very sweet, but that has returned to normal in just a few days. I’ll pick up a small amount when I go to the store this weekend and try it out.
@latestfuels
I have tried berries in my huel as per my original post, but it didn’t taste like berries at all. It didn’t even taste like vanilla either. It morphed into something horrible tasting. Perhaps I needed to add a bit of something sweet (they were frozen berries so not super sweet by themselves), but I’m not sure. I thought the vanilla huel would be sweet enough to cancel out the tartness of the frozen berries. And they were defrosted before I blended them.
I was hoping that maybe someone had a similar experience to mine that they tried to add things and almost everything made the Huel taste bad. Milk for example, thought it would just make a creamy vanilla Huel, it tasted disgusting to me. I did try to add a bit of anise extract one day (I love black licorice), but it seemed like it just made my shaker smell strongly of anise, but I couldn’t actually taste it in the Huel (at least it didn’t make it taste bad though). Difficult to do with a liquid, perhaps I’ll try premixing my Huel before I leave and then put it in the fridge at work for some that require liquid.
Not quite that, but I used to add coffee to it. In the end, I decided that I rather had coffee on its own and Huel on its own.
If I were you I wouldn’t give up. There must be out there that works for you. We just need to succeed on finding things you don’t like another 1000 times. Once we done that successfuly, we might find the 1 formula that works for you.
Well, after starting to implement Huel as a second meal, I could experiment with that meal. It seems like extracts work the best for me for flavoring. I retried the anise with a bit more extract this time and got a nice anise flavor. I also got some coconut extract and did the same. It’s too bad extracts tend to cost quite a bit, but I guess since you don’t have to use much, it will hopefully work out fine. It doesn’t add extra sugar so that is one bonus.
I also tried the coffee creamer one, and I did enjoy it, but it was very sweet. I have a bit of unsweetened left so I still need to try to see if adding the coffee creamer to it will make it palatable to me. If I add coffee creamer, I have just been mixing unsweetened and vanilla Huel to bring down the sugar and sweetness.
The final thing I tried was the curry recipe. It was interesting. I didn’t completely enjoy it, but I think that’s also because I didn’t have a low salt bullion cube and tried it with a regular bullion cube so it ended up being very salty. I think it might work with lower salt values, but I’m enjoying the extract flavored ones the most so I’m not sure when or if I might retry the curry one.
I’m not sure if this was noted above but have you tried mixing powdered peanut butter or pb2 into your Huel? Powdered peanut butter is my favorite way to Huel.
@Alex_Huel I think peanut butter was mentioned. It would probably work with some blending, I did add peanut butter for the peanut curry recipe and could taste the peanut butter. It didn’t completely incorporate by shaking though so probably blender is best. I have never gotten powdered peanut butter before, but perhaps that would work best for a non-blended option. I only have a rocket sort of blender that uses the small cups for mostly making smoothies. However, the cups on those are not quite big enough for a 3 scoop Huel meal, especially if adding things so blending isn’t most ideal for me. But then again, it probably didn’t help that I had crunchy peanut butter on hand so that would likely be more difficult to implement by shaking/stirring than other types of peanut butter.
@Andrew_Goodwin It seems 1 tsp of extract is a good place to start and then I do to taste from there.
similar experience- some how could not deal with unflavored / unsweetened version and I just love the basic taste of the Vanilla version without any additives.
However, of late, I have been trying a small quantity of freshly crushed cardamom seeds with the vanilla version - seems to work for me and enhances the flavor.
I had a similar experience as you. I didn’t get a booklet in my order. Its actually on it’s way. But did you order any of the flavors they offer to mix with it? I ordered both the strawberry and chocolate. I have to say, I thought I would like the strawberry more so I ordered 3, as it turns out I only ordered 1 chocolate and I love it. It does make a big difference. Don’t give up though, and check online for recipes from time to time. I saw one that used apple cider and it said it tasted like apple pie. I’m definately trying that one and I saw a few more that I’m also gonna give it a go. If you sign up at the website, you can look under the recipe ideas and there are a lot of good ones on there. Good luck!
@anand_ba I have never tried cardamom. I’ll put it on my list.
@Sharlapp I have not tried their additives. I was hesitant to try them out due to cost, but I might be giving in to try some since they would be a bit better on price than extracts and less sugar than using coffee creamer. I did try adding apple cider mix once and it did not taste good to me, but then again I did try it with the unflavored unsweetened Huel. I thought the sugar in the cider mix would balance out but it ended up tasting like a bad sour apple. I haven’t tried it with the vanilla Huel yet.
Like you my first order was 1 bag each of the U/U and Vanilla. I enjoy the Vanilla on its own as well as with Huel’s cappuccino flavor boost. When I tried the U/U however, it was horrible. I tried it with powdered peanut butter and it didn’t make it much better, and added too many calories. The pumpkin sounds really good though. So how much of the canned pumpkin and pumpkin spice do you use? Does the canned pumpkin blend well? I’d really like to find a savory flavor that appeals to me.
Just to clarify, I did not try pumpkin with pumpkin pie spice with unsweetened Huel. I used vanilla Huel. I didn’t measure the canned pumpkin, just plopped in a heaping spoonful. I didn’t even use a blender, it actually incorporated just fine with shaking. Does help to use the ice guard to help with the mixing though.
I tried with vanilla and the chocolate additives from Huel. While not powerfully tasting. I did grow to like it. I’ve also tried Ensure protein powder and I must say, it was by far the best I’ve tried yet. I’m not done experimenting with other recipies as well. Still waiting on my Information booklet that I didn’t receive with my order. I’m sure once I receive that, I’ll be a lot more informed of Huel and the different ways to use it. Good luck on your journey.
Sincerely,
