Feed Zone Portables

Feed Zone Portables is an excellent cookery book – though that's only half the story. As well as a wide range of recipes for fuelling your riding, it also has lots of useful information about nutrition for cyclists.

Anyone who's been around the pro peloton at the start of a race will know that it's not just bars and gels that the riders tuck into their pockets: there are almost as many different foil-wrapped homemade snack choices out there as there are riders, some of whom have even been known to swap food with other teams on the go to get hold of stuff they prefer from a different team chef. 

Biju Thomas and Allen Lim know this, as they've been working with professional cyclists for many years, and have developed a wide range of on-the-go recipes for ride nutrition, with a thorough grounding in the science of nutrition to back it up.

This book isn't just about the 75 recipes: you're 70 pages in before the first one. The start of the book is concerned with how in-ride nutrition works, and how to get the best from it. There's really good information on how much you really need to eat and drink, whether your calories should come from food or drink, the importance of hydration and much more. It's a bit heavy going at times but there's a wealth of information in there to digest. There's even a section for wrapping your snacks like a pro.

> How to eat right for your sportive

The first section of the book is dedicated to rice cakes, which are such a staple of the pro peloton that it's difficult to understand why they don't feature much more in the world of mass-produced, off-the-shelf ride nutrition. Maybe they just don't lend themselves to large-scale production. Anyway, there's a big range of sweet and savoury options.

Then there are eggs, pies, waffles, cookies and cakes, and more: baked pasta, sticky oat-based snacks, burritos... Whatever your preferences, there should be something in there to suit you.

It might take a while to work your way through the book to find out what works best for you, but it won't be an onerous task, with plenty of tasty recipes in every section. Along the way there are soundbites from a wealth of professional athletes extolling the virtues of homemade nutrition.

Overall, it's a genuinely interesting and useful book, with a wide range of ride nutrition options to try, and plenty of science at the start to get your teeth into as well. If you're fed up of struggling down gels or bars to keep you going, this is well worth getting hold of.

Verdict

Excellent resource for learning about ride nutrition and making your own ride snacks