After reading your full accounting, the pies were after all, not really identical. My best guess is that the moister pie crust leeched softened crumbs into your pie filling, giving the pie an overall muddier quality. I've had similar experiences with apple pies going muddy from either the thickener not gelling or the crust not holding up to the liquid filling. (Your filling sounds very interesting though! Yum!)
I don't have a scientific backing to what I am going to say, but still I will try to make my point clear!
Cooking eggs is more of an intuitive thing. The fast vs. slow thing comes more from your own rendezvous with it.
Like in my house, when we say omelet, only my husband is allowed to put hands on it because he gets that perfect round thing without breaking any of the edges every single time he does it. I will share his method:
Take a flat pan and heat it good enough.
Drizzle a little oil on it and rotate the pan once so that oil gets to the sides.
Now all you need to do is pour your beaten eggs on the pan and slowly cook it on a low flame until the edges start separating from the pan automatically(atleast it will come out easily when you raise it with spatula)
And bang on, our omlete gets cooked pretty fine everytime with a very soft and fluffy texture.
But when you say scrambled eggs, I would follow a different methodology in which I would:
- Take a pan with deep base and heat it good enough.
- Pour very little oil, just so that eggs don't stick to the pan.
- Pour the egg mix and keep the pan on very high flame and stir the thing vigorously until the eggs are cooked and it looks ready.
Basically what I think is, when you cook anything on a high flame, you need to stir it along so that the food does not stick to the bottom and gets burnt(even when you are using a non stick pan, eggs might get stuck in a minute or so), which you can do while making scrambled eggs but can't do while making an omelet obviously.
I hope next time you put your hands on it, you will listen to your heart!! Happy Eggs!! :)
Best Answer
Yes, they would be processed under pressure. What I'm not seeing in your ingredient list are any thickeners or binding agents, which definitely works against creating density in the final product.
Now, I've never made protein bars (because I'm a fat kid and don't eat them (not that I'm actually fat)), but I have made granola bars, and in granola you use a combination of molasses and butter (or butter, honey and brown sugar, in some recipes) to hold it all together and create that density. Not the nutritional effect you're looking for, but in terms of physics, the same idea.
As far as the ingredients you don't have, both are readily obtainable. Soy lecithin, or any kind of lecithin, is an emulsifier, which basically means that it assists in mixing ingredients of differing types. Most commonly, that means mixing an ingredient that is water-based with one that is oil-based (mayonnaise and pretty much any baked good other than yeast breads are all good examples of this - the lecithin in the egg yolks is what holds everything together). Not sure what your grocers are like, but I could buy soy lecithin from the baking aisle at mine. Bob's Red Mill manufactures bags of the stuff.
As for polydextrose, it's an "artificial sweetener" made from natural sugars (dextrose), sorbitol (a low-GI sugar alcohol that can either be made by reducing glucose or found in peaches, pears, apples, etc.), and a little citric acid. Note that it's considered artificial because the substance is man-made, not necessarily any of the component parts. What it does is help hold everything together, because it's also used as a thickening and hardening agent (which is ironic, because it's also used as a humectant, which means it keeps things moist). In other words, without this one ingredient, not only is your recipe not going to be able to hold any kind of density without something to replace it, but it's also likely to taste like flavored cardboard. The good news is that you can buy it on Amazon.
My honest advice would be to obtain the missing ingredients - the polydextrose at the very least - and use something heavy - perhaps a tortilla or burger press with a couple weights on top? - to press the mash before you cook it (and yes, you should cook it, I think for 10-15 minutes? Play with that.). Then refrigerate it all for a couple hours to harden it, then cut.
If all else fails, give up, and make granola bars with lots of nuts for protein. :-) In any case, here's a link to a pretty good explanation of how to make granola bars. I know, I know, not what you want to come up with, but I would imagine the process should be roughly similar.