Pick up a branded gel and look at what you're actually buying. Inside the fancy sachet is a small amount of carbohydrate — maltodextrin, fructose, a bit of water, maybe some salt and caffeine. The carbohydrate itself costs pennies. You're paying a couple of pounds, or a couple of dollars, for the packaging, the convenience and the brand. Do that across a five-hour ride and a full season of training, and the bill is genuinely eye-watering.
Here's the good news: you can make fuel at home that hits the same numbers — the same carbohydrate, the same absorption, the same 90 grams an hour — for a tiny fraction of the price. The pros do it. Their soigneurs and chefs are mixing bottles and baking rice cakes by the hundred, not because the teams are short of money, but because homemade fuel is fresher, more controllable and easier on the gut. Let me show you how to make the three things you actually need.
First, the one rule that matters
Before any recipe, understand the single principle that makes fuel work, because it's the thing the expensive products are really selling you: the glucose-to-fructose ratio.
Your gut absorbs glucose-type carbohydrate through one transporter and fructose through a completely different one. Lean only on glucose and you hit a ceiling fast. But blend the two — at a ratio of roughly 1 part glucose-type carbohydrate to 0.8 parts fructose — and you open a second absorption pathway, which is how a trained gut takes on 90 grams an hour and more without trouble. This is the science, from Asker Jeukendrup's work on multiple transportable carbohydrates, that every premium fuel is built on. Get that ratio right at home and your homemade fuel does exactly what the branded stuff does. Ignore it and no recipe will save you.
So the building blocks are simple and cheap: maltodextrin (your glucose-type carbohydrate, a flavourless powder you can buy by the kilo) and fructose (fruit sugar, also sold as a powder). A bag of each costs a fraction of a single box of gels and lasts for months.
The homemade drink mix
This is the workhorse, and it's almost embarrassingly simple.
Into a bottle, put maltodextrin and fructose in roughly a 1-to-0.8 ratio — for example, around 50 grams of maltodextrin to 40 grams of fructose gives you about 90 grams of carbohydrate. Add a good pinch of salt for the sodium you lose in sweat, and a splash of squash, a squeeze of lemon or a little juice for flavour, because flavourless carbohydrate gets grim after three hours. Fill with water to a sensible concentration — and this is the part people get wrong. Don't make it syrupy. A drink mixed too strong sits in the stomach and makes you sick, the most common cause of GI distress there is. If you want a lot of carbohydrate, carry some of it as a concentrated flask and chase it with plain water rather than tipping everything into one thick bottle.
That's it. That bottle does the same job as a tub of premium drink mix costing many times more. Scale the amounts to hit your target carbohydrate per hour, and you've solved most of your fuelling for the price of a coffee.
The homemade gel
A gel is nothing more than a very concentrated version of that drink mix, carried in a way you can squeeze into your mouth.
Take maltodextrin and fructose in the same 1-to-0.8 ratio, but use far less water — just enough to make a thick, pourable syrup. Warm it gently to dissolve everything fully, let it cool, and decant it into a small reusable gel flask, the kind that holds a few servings. A pinch of salt and a little flavour again make it bearable. Out on the ride, a mouthful from the flask followed by a swig of water gives you a precise hit of carbohydrate exactly like a branded gel — because chemically, that's what it is.
The reusable flask is the other win here: no more pockets full of sticky empty wrappers, no more litter on the road. One flask, refilled before every ride.
The rice cake: the pro peloton's real food
Liquid and gels are perfect for the back half of a hard ride, but six hours of sweet syrup is a fast route to flavour fatigue and a turning stomach. This is why the pros lean on real food for the early hours, and the king of pro real food is the rice cake.
Rice cakes were popularised in the peloton by the sports scientist Allen Lim, and the idea is simple: cooked white rice, pressed into small squares with a little added sugar and often a beaten egg or a touch of flavouring to hold it together and make it tasty. You wrap them in foil and stuff them in your jersey pockets. They give you real-food carbohydrate that's gentle on the gut, satisfying to chew, and a blessed relief from sweetness in the first couple of hours of a long day. The pros eat them precisely because they sit so easily on the stomach when there's still a long way to go. This is the kind of thinking the pro team chefs build their whole approach around: simple, real, easy-to-absorb carbohydrate, made fresh.
The plan that falls out of this is the one most experienced riders use without thinking: real food early, when the pace is steady and the gut is happy, then switch to gels and drink mix later, when the effort is high and you need fuel that needs no digesting.
Adding caffeine, and a real day's plan
Two things to round this out: the one extra worth adding, and how it all fits together on a long day.
The extra is caffeine, because it genuinely works and it's trivial to add. The research consistently supports caffeine for endurance performance at a dose of roughly 3 to 6 milligrams per kilogram of bodyweight, taken in the back half of a long ride when you need it most. You can add it to a homemade gel flask with a caffeine tablet crushed and dissolved in, or simply time a coffee or a cola for the closing hours. Just test your dose in training, because tolerance varies and the last thing you want on a long ride is a jittery stomach on top of everything else.
Now the plan, because the individual recipes only matter once they're a system. Picture a five-hour event for an 80kg rider aiming at around 80 grams of carbohydrate an hour. The first two hours, while the pace is steady and the gut is fresh, lean on rice cakes from your pockets — real food, easy on the stomach, a relief from sweetness. Through the whole ride, sip your homemade maltodextrin-and-fructose drink mix, refilling bottles at stops, carrying the bulk of your carbohydrate in liquid form. Then in the last two hours, when the effort climbs and you can't face chewing, switch to the gel flask, adding the caffeine here for the final push. Real food early, liquid throughout, gels and caffeine late. That's the structure the pros use, it costs a fraction of an all-branded approach, and every part of it you made yourself.
Test it before you trust it
One firm warning, because it's the rule that overrides everything else. Whatever you make, test it thoroughly in training before you rely on it in an event. Get the ratios slightly off, make the mix too concentrated, or ask your gut to handle a homemade recipe it's never seen on the most important day of your season, and you'll learn the hard way why "nothing new on race day" is the oldest rule in the book. Build your recipes, dial in the concentration, and practise them on your long rides exactly as you'll use them — which is also how you train your gut to handle the quantity in the first place.
The honest economics
I'm not here to tell you branded fuel is a con — it isn't. The good products are excellent, the convenience is real, and the consistency matters when you can't afford a fuelling mistake. If you want to buy them, buy them with a clear conscience.
But the carbohydrate inside them is cheap, the science is no secret, and an afternoon with a bag of maltodextrin, a bag of fructose and a rice cooker will fuel you through months of training for the price of a single box of gels. For a serious amateur riding big hours on a normal budget, that's not a small thing. The pros make their own because it's better and cheaper, and they have soigneurs to do the mixing. You don't, but an hour in the kitchen on a Sunday sets you up for a fortnight of training, and you'll never look at the price of a single gel the same way again. You can absolutely do this.
Pair this with how much carbohydrate to take per hour and the in-ride nutrition guide for the full fuelling picture. Got a recipe that works? Share it with the community on Skool.