Abinas feels they are quite versatile. “You can prepare them with a variety of cereals or millets as base. It’s also nice to have a combination of these or mix and match,” he points out. However, it is not just the easy-to-source traditional ones that he roots for, but also some offbeat varieties. “Perhaps the most exotic bliss balls I have come across were made from a mixture of desiccated berries and an assortment of nuts in Mumbai once,” he remembers.
Versatility and ease of preparation are also what chef and cookbook author Mallika Badrinath loves about such healthy snack balls. “A variety of cereals and millets commonly available, like ragi, jowar (cholam), fox-tail millet, pearl millet, barnyard millet and so on, that can be used for energy balls. In fact, tasty combinations of these give your new flavours,” she says.
Some like Priya Ravikrishnan from Thiruvananthapuram, goes the extra mile to make her own health mix that serve as the base for the nutri balls her family loves to munch on.
“Along with my home-prepared multi-grain mix, which packs in 18 nutritious items such as bamboo rice, finger millet, foxtail millet, flaxseed, green gram, horse gram and so on, I add mashed dates, and coarsely powdered almonds, walnuts, cashew, white sesame seeds and a wee bit of honey,” she says. The scope for experimentation is wide, even for those trying at home.
