After my longest ever bike ride, 300 km, I didn't touch a gel for years, heh. Got so sick of 3+ gels per hour for those ~8 hours.

I dropped gels pretty fast. Hard to get if you're not somewhere with sports stores, and expensive.

These days I cram haribo and peanut butter M&Ms, although I think the latter are more useful for multiday things.

Yeah, I bought a huge bulk pack online, and then it was okay. But when you need a couple a week it quickly adds up in cost. Same with bars, which I sometimes prefer over gels for longer rides to not just have gels in my stomach. I've tried to bake some bars myself, or make some rice cakes from Velochef ( https://www.rouleur.cc/blogs/desire-journal/velochef-henrik-... ) instead.

Thanks for the recipe! Reminds me... A friend of mine made a megagel that was some kind of chocolate concoction that he carried in a 300ml soft flask. It had sugar, salts, caffeine, actually tasted great, and I believe was pretty cheap to make. I have to get the recipe from him.

Edit: I did the math on that risotto cake recipe and it comes out to about 2500kcal for the batch, for me that comes out to calories for ~5-6 hours of riding.

I don't understand how you manage to do 300km only with gels. That would have been atrocious.

I did a similar ride a few years ago, I mixed gels, energy bars with bananas, nuts, sandwichs, nuts and pastries bought along the way.