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On test: Gorge Delights Pear Bars and JustFruit Bars, April 7, 2005
Get fruity!
Tastes like fruit and goes crunch to boot. Steve Beletich tries Pear Bars and JustFruit Bars from Gorge Delights.
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Crunch - that's the sound of dropping into a huge gear and mashing it down the length of the final straight, fuelled by a dangerously high blood fructose level. Crunch - that's also the sound my digestive tract makes after eating four Pear Bars in one go - two pears in each bar makes eight pears - don't try this at home, kids.
Gorge Delights have matured from humble beginnings as fruit farmers to vertically-integrated growers, manufacturers and sellers of fruit products like Pear Bars and JustFruit Bars. Pear Bars are available in any flavour you like, so long as it's pear. Actually they come in pear-cranberry, pear-blueberry, pear-strawberry and pear-pear. JustFruit bars come in apple, apple-blueberry, apple-cherry and apple-raspberry. All claim to be free from artificial preservatives, flavours and additives, with a shelf life of up to two years. You can get the detailed nutritional specs from the Gorge Delights website, but each bar is 40g of pure fruit with around 130-150 calories. The glycemic index (GI) of dried fruit is low, which means these bars should give you a sustained energy boost, and there's no added sugar to worry about.
Road Testing
Seeing as I had a number of Pear Bars and JustFruit Bars to get through for this review (i.e. a whole box) I thought I would consume them before, during and after riding. This fitted nicely with my latest principle of eating carbs to aid recovery. Recently this practice has made a huge difference to my professional life - it stops my head from dropping onto the desk in the afternoon, after an early morning hill sprint session with the lads.
I launched into my first Pear Bar whilst stretching before a ride. Boy, is there some serious fruit in these things. They taste like PEAR! the way a sun-dried tomato tastes like TOMATO! This comes as a surprise initially, but I after eating one I found I could not stop. The cranberry and blueberry variants disappeared in no time, and the strawberry and straight pear were gobbled up mid-ride. All tasted great - strong flavour, very filling but also hard to stop at just one. The JustFruit apple-based bars were similar: strong yet pleasing taste and very densely packed with fruit. I have to admit that I was not a big fan of the apple-cherry bar - too sweet and too much like those glacé cherries you used to discard, big-mac-pickle-style, from your grandma's fruitcake.
All the bars were quite solid, so they didn't disintegrate in my hands whilst riding and shoving bar into gob. The packaging was easy to open, which is another big plus in my eyes. I got a noticeable and sustained energy boost, which is just as well considering how many bars I consumed. Most pleasingly I found that they helped enormously with recovery. Again, I wouldn't recommend eating too many at a time. Forgetting that four bars contain eight pieces of fruit can have unintended consequences 6 to 12 hours later, if you get my drift.
All in all, the Gorge Delights' Pear Bars and JustFruit Bars got a tick in all the right boxes. Great taste, easy to digest, easy to get the packaging open with one hand and your teeth, good energy supplementation, and helpful for recovery. They've also got a pretty long shelf life which should translate to long jersey pocket life. All this without added sugar or chemicals makes for a winning combination in my book.
Materials: Pear, apple and other fruits
Price: US$15.85 (box of 16)
Pros: Natural ingredients, low GI, long shelf life
Cons: Cherry flavour - yuck
More information: www.gorgedelights.com
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