I started checking out carob the other day, but everything I looked at from the stuff in bins to the carob chips in packages has a bunch of other avoids mixed in with it. Does anyone have any other chocolate substitute ideas? Or know of a pure form of carob?

I am really going to miss my chocolate chip pumpkin spelt pancakes on the weekends!

And, I just might need something to get me over the hump until I get used to not eating it. I didn't realize how much I had started eating it again, until I started the GTD and have started to minimize it (step one).

You can get pure carob powder and it's pretty tasty.  Do you have a Whole Foods close to you?  Just about any health food store carries it.  Ask if you can't find it.

Carob powder makes great "milk" shakes.  You can use it anywhere you'd use cocoa powder.  My new favorite is mixing the powder with a little agave nectar into a thick paste and spreading it on a rice cake.

Yeah, I've found the same problem.  I do have some plain old carob powder though, so it looks like we'll be baking from scratch.  
Maybe a nice almond milk carob shake would be good..

I left a carob brownie recipe on the second page of the thread titled "GT3 Teachers discussion...ch-ch-changes ".  I'd give you a link directly to it, but can't remember at the moment how to do it.

I think this'll take you to the brownie recipe:

http://www.dadamo.com/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl?b-GTDdiet/m-1198772539/s-36/#num36

Hmmm, well, it takes you to the page, anyhow.  The recipe is in post #36.

EDIT: The link now goes to the right post - Lloyd

Almond butter mixed with a little carob molasses is a wonderful substitute for plain chocolate (much better than chocolate actually).

I love carob chips but not all the sugar in them, so I use plan carob powder and add a bit of ghee and agave nectar to it to make carob paste. Carob powder does indeed make a wonderful ingredient in smoothies and shakes--it gives them a nice malty taste. Yael's suggestion to mix carob molasses and almond butter is good too--it's very intense and rich, a little goes a long way! I tried it on some oatcakes and it was pure heaven, wow!

I just started mixing carob powder with plain Whey Protein Powder last week and it is good.  I never had carob before.  It adds a nice flavor.

Wow, thanks everyone for all the delicious sounding suggestions! I sure hope I can find the carob powder at my local HFS. And carob molasses? That sounds intriguing as well.

I'm wondering if like most everything else that is better for me, I'll end up actually preferring carob to chocolate. Wouldn't that be great? It sounds like that's already happened for some people here and that's always encouraging.

Yeah, what is carob molasses?  I'm hoping that it's made entirely from carob, rather than being a mixture of cane molasses and carob powder.

My main gripe about carob as a chocolate sub has always been that I've never found any carob products with that rich, smooth *feel* that chocolate has in my mouth.

But I recently read that high-quality virgin coconut oil has, when chilled, a sort of "white chocolate" mouth-feel.  Since white chocolate (which is actually a mixture of cocoa butter, milk, and sugar) has a similar mouth-feel to regular chocolate bars, I'm thinking that carob (powder or molasses) mixed with virgin coconut oil and stored in the fridge might be a *really* good chocolate sub for Teachers.

OK, I've found some info on carob molasses.  It's apparently a common food product in the Middle East, which explains why Yael is familiar with it.

And here's what I read on one forum site: "I'm staying with a vegetarian (very close to vegan) chef friend who has all these amazing ingredients and he pulled out carob molasses!! It's basically molasses made from carob and carob only! Amazing...."

Now I just need to find some, preferably organic.

I started a thread in the Cook Right forum on carob molasses. You can buy it from Amazon.com and several other sources if you google 'carob molasses'. I was able to buy some from the great little bulk foods place down the street from us. It is indeed made just from carob and water, nothing else. The taste is really neat--sort of a tangy mild blackstrap without the strong iron flavor. I used it in a quickbread recipe as the sweetener, and the result tasted almost exactly like my mother's delicious brown bread. It made a fantastic salmon salad sandwich!

Quoted from RedLilac

I just started mixing carob powder with plain Whey Protein Powder last week and it is good.  I never had carob before.  It adds a nice flavor.

What brand of plain whey protein powder do you like, and where did you buy it?

Thanks for the info, Brighid.  (Here's a link to the thread she's talking about: http://www.dadamo.com/cgi-bin/Blah/Blah.pl?b-btdlf1/m-1200171809/s-new/.)

Would carob molasses be like cocoa butter?

cocoa butter is a brittle solid fat, and molasses is sweet sticky goo...completely different, no matter what they are made from, would be my guess.

Oh.  I thought cocoa butter was like a butter consistency.  Oh, well.

Quoted from Gumby

cocoa butter is a brittle solid fat, and molasses is sweet sticky goo...completely different, no matter what they are made from, would be my guess.

I assume so too -- it was the virgin coconut oil that I mentioned as reportedly having a mouth-feel similar to cocoa butter.

Quoted from Drea

What brand of plain whey protein powder do you like, and where did you buy it?

I use the NOW brand for both.  The NOW plant is only a couple of towns away from me, so it is big in my area.