Keto/Low Carb Lemon Bar Recipe

If you know me at all, you know that I’m a chocoholic, so lemon bars were never really on my radar. Until I tried one that my pastry chef at my work made. It was sweet, lemony, creamy and super delicious. It has been quite some time since I had that lemon bar but I believe I got pretty darn close with this recipe.
#coconutflour #nutfree

Ingredients, blog link and macros below!!!!

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Shortbread Crust Ingredients

64 g Coconut flour (1/2 Cup + 1/2 Tbs.)
48 g Granulated Alternative Sweetener (1/4 cup)
1/4 tsp. Xanthan Gum
8 Tbs. Butter (4 oz., 113 g) Melted
Pinch of Salt (if using unsalted butter)
1/2 tsp. Vanilla Extract

Lemon Bar Filling Ingredients

360-400g Allulose (2 1/4-2 1/2 cup, depending on desired sweetness)
Zest of 4 Lemons
1 Cup Lemon Juice
8 Eggs
58 g Unflavored Whey Protein Isolate (2 scoops)
15 g Coconut Flour(2 tbs.)
1 tsp. Xanthan Gum

Macros: Cut into 16
130 Calories
9 g Fat
7 g Total Carbs
2 g Fiber
3 g Sugar alcohol
2 g Net Carbs
7 g Protein

Blog Link to Full Recipe- https://www.ketoupgrade.info/post/keto-low-carb-lemon-bars

hey guys coming at you today with a delicious summer dessert keto lemon bars so let’s get started [Music] hey everyone welcome back if you’re new here my name’s alicia and i’m a pastry chef with a sweet tooth so i’m here to bring you the most delicious keto pastries i possibly can so if you enjoy these recipes please consider hitting the subscribe button hitting the bell icon sharing with all your friends it all helps my channel grow and to bring you new keto desserts every saturday today some delicious sweet and tangy lemon bars and i figured out like a traditional lemon bar it is super soft and custardy like it is awesome i can’t believe i got so close to like a regular lemon bar recipe and i’m super happy to bring this to you today it all starts with a shortbread crust which we have made multiple times on this channel i just took my shortbread crust from i believe it was my key lime pie i’ve done it with there’s a bunch of other ones too but i think the most recent was my key lime pie i’ll link that up there if you haven’t seen that that’s another delicious summer treat but i got my dry ingredients already ready here i’m gonna just list everything up on the screen for you i already sifted everything together i’m just gonna melt one stick of salted butter i don’t put salt in my mix but if you use unsalted butter just put a pinch of salt in your dry ingredients i’m going to give my dry ingredients a little whisk i use a locanto granular monk fruit erythritol blend use straight erythritol if you want you could also use a blend i wouldn’t suggest using anything that is really like a small amount of sweetener my recipes aren’t going to work because you need the volume the same kind of volume that i have in my recipes so if you go and use a straight stevia that is like really potent and sweet and you only need a tiny bit it’s not going to work to keep your crust together because you need bulk in the recipe in order to match my recipe so it’s not going to work but you have like stevia alternatives that are a one for one with sugar those will work or like a splenda substitute that is one for one with sugar they usually add something in there to balance and make it so it’s not just a really tiny amount of sweetener and i don’t know if anybody knows i’ve been commenting in the comments about allulose cellulose keep things soft so if you put allelos in this recipe it’s not gonna get like crunchy it’s gonna stay soft no matter what that’s the only problem with cellulose alias is great for a lot of things but it doesn’t let things get crispy we’re just gonna add a half a teaspoon of vanilla extract to our butter basically it’s just a vanilla shortbread crust you’re just gonna mix this a little bit and then mix it into your dry ingredients and give it a mix up it’s gonna be like a wet sandy consistency it takes a minute to rehydrate the coconut flour and all that but it will get thicker as it sits you basically just pat it into a 9 by 13 pan i did do this believe it or not metal and glass and all that like different kinds of pans cook differently so i was doing this in silicone at work and it was cooking really fast the glass one i did a test in and it took forever for the crust to brown so i have a time on my recipe but just know you need it kind of golden brown because you don’t want it too blond because it won’t cook anymore and i ended up the one with the glass i didn’t end up cooking it long enough and like the crust kept coming apart from the lemon filling and you don’t want that this doesn’t seem like a lot of crust and it isn’t but i’m one of those people that doesn’t like a lot of crust so you can easily double the crust recipe if you want a thicker crust on your lemon bars but this also keeps the carb count pretty low so doubling the crust would add a little bit of carbs to each lemon bar maybe 0.5 or so but i just do a thin layer all across the bottom of a 9×13 pan it’s almost like clay like you can literally just like mold it wherever you want spread it out nice and thin if you cut these lemon bars into 16 they’re 2 carbs each if you cut it into 12 which they’re kind of big if they’re 12. it is 3 carbs but that’s how i was selling them at the bakery when i already have my oven preheated to 350 so i didn’t forget to do it before this was done once you’ve got it all kind of spread out you can see what parts are a little bit thinner kind of move it along to those different parts try to have it as even as you can okay i’m going to pop this in the oven until it’s done i’m probably putting the recipe like 12 to 16 minutes like i said the glass 9×13 took even longer i think it was 16 minutes i pulled it but it could have went even longer than that so just keep an eye on it and turn it after about six minutes so that it browns evenly while that’s cooking we can get on to the lemon part of this recipe and i bought these lemons these things are enormous like i’ve never seen lemons this freaking big usually i zest four lemons and juice them and if i don’t have any more lemons i’ll use a lemon juice you can buy at the store i’m gonna put up a picture of the brand that is the only brand i found that didn’t have anything added to it and wasn’t like a concentrate i think santa cruz is the brand i found it at walmart two cups for two dollars which isn’t that bad of a price to make up for if you only have a couple lemons on hand and you can’t get a whole cup of lemon juice but i got plenty right here these things are enormous i don’t know how juicy they’re gonna be but they are so big it’s crazy i’m gonna stick with four let’s see how much juice we get and in my pot i have 360 grams of cellulose that is equal to about two and a quarter cups you can go all the way up to two and a half cups on the ellulose i did that with my first test it wasn’t as lemony as i wanted it it was a little bit sweeter so i cut back the yellows a little bit but it does make it even softer and more like jelly like almost of a of a custard consistency but i found that two and a half quarter cups of alulos was like the right consistency for me so i’m gonna zest right into this pot and to do it the easiest way is to start and do one long stroke on your microplane and then turn your lemon and do another stroke and keep turning your lemon and do another stroke these friggin lemons are enormous though i can barely fit it in my hand crazy i’m getting like one line at a time what you want makes it the fastest process and then you can just like go and do some of this on the top if you want but these lemons are huge we’re getting plenty of zest you can also do this recipe in an 8 by 8 dish you can keep the same amount of crust or you can cut it in half depending on how thick you want it and you can cut the filling in half and do an 8 by 8 pan that’s what i started with my test so i wasn’t doing 9x13s and having a ton wasted if it didn’t work out so when i go i have a juicer here i know there’s a bunch of different kinds the one that series keto has is really nice but it does make it easier when you have a lot to juice i just cut the ends off especially these ones because they’re huge i don’t even know if this is going to fit in my juicer i’m going to cut them in half i might not even fit in that guy i might have to do it by hand paring knife barely fits through okay i did six minutes i just turned it in another six and it seems like it might be done at 12 minutes in a metal 9×13 so a glass one just does not cook as fast i said we need a cup of lemon juice so yeah this like doesn’t even barely fit in here oh boy if you do gotta do juicing lemons by hand i usually do it cut side up and over my hand but also you can just not even care about the seeds and just get a cup of juice and then strain it when you put it into your sweetener and zest mixture seems very enormous it’s probably still juice in there my thing just won’t even like get it [Music] got almost a cup out of those four lemons i need another half a guy it’s a little bit smaller fitting my thing better that’s like the size of a regular half a lemon almost at a cup there’s a cup i might even use that whole half there so five lemons i haven’t pulled this guy out in a while we do have to heat the allelos up this might be an unnecessary step but i didn’t want to take the chance of it being grainy and basically we’re making a custard here so another way to make a custard is to temper your eggs with a hot liquid and then you cook it for longer to make with a custard but we’re basically just throwing it into the crust and cooking it in the oven as a custard so it makes sense to heat it i mean the original recipe for a lemon bar you just mix everything together but because our sweeteners don’t like to dissolve you know like regular sweeteners the first one i tried i did the granular monk fruit erythritol blend and i just did it like the recipe and it was basically like eating a bunch of sand like it was just crunchy lemon sugar basically so when i did my other tests i did a powdered sugar one without heating it like a powdered monkford erythritol and that did work so if you want to skip this step you can do everything and just mix it all together with powdered erythritol or monk fruit erythritol blend and bake it and it will work but you got to do half the amount of sweetener there that was 12 minutes it’s nice and golden brown that’s what you want so i did 16 in a mil in a glass pan and it wasn’t even brown so metal cooks a lot faster so if you do the powder sweetener you need half as much sweetener so you need only a cup and a couple tablespoons of powdered sweetener and your lemon bars end up being way shorter because you have less volume of sugar so i like the cellulose version but if you can’t do elelos you can do a powdered sweetener of your choice but not granular because that was not good so i’m just going to put this on as low as i can and just let that heat while we’re getting the rest of our ingredients together i just got a spatula to keep moving this around you don’t want to boil this or anything you’re just basically getting the sugar dissolved in there the elulo sweetener so i’m putting eight eggs into a bowl i have had these sitting out for a couple of hours just to get them a little bit acclimated to room temperature you’re gonna be tempering this with hot liquid so either way you’re gonna be warming these up slowly so that they don’t scramble but we’re going to be putting some ingredients in here also that are kind of going to protect the eggs if you add like flowers and stuff to your eggs they’re almost protected from hot liquid you can use like a beater for this but i just use brute strength a regular lemon bar recipe has like a cup of flour in it so i basically figured out what i had to replace to make it keto and i did an unflavored whey protein a tiny bit of coconut flour and a little bit of xanthan gum and that’s it in this dry ingredient mixture i’m going to sift it right into the eggs i’ll put all the ingredients up on the screen it’s just two scoops of whey protein isolate i use iso pure that’s the one that i’ve never had a problem with in baking i have had disasters with other ones so i just try and stick with the one that i know works i have used perfect keto’s whey proteins and they have worked also but i’m not sure about the unflavored if they have an unflavored version but i know that their chocolate has a couple extra carbs in it isopure has zero carbs so that’s why i use iso pure give this a whisk oh try not to fling it everywhere gonna look like a clumpy mask no matter what pretty much but once you get the syrup in there it’ll be a little less chunky there’s a couple little lumps left in there it’s like all our sweetener is pretty much dissolved in there so i’m going to turn that off and go grab my pot holder cause these handles get hot slowly stream in your hot sugar liquid and whisk as you add more you can add a little bit more at a time just want to start with a splash or two once your eggs get acclimated and add more nice scrape down of all the sides here pretty much all the lumpies are out there to scrape down and one more whisk and then into your crust and into the oven try to get all your lemon zest out of your whisk you want all that in there so your crust is cooled to the touch now so pour it in after you scrape it all in there all counted in the macros and lemon juice even though it says it’s like one carb for or might even say zero carb for a teaspoon or something on the back of the package there are carbs in lemon juice they just add up just like in heavy cream it is about six carbs for a cup of heavy cream but on the back of the package it says zero but those are hidden carbs so we’re going to pop this into the oven i am going to turn it halfway through last time in my oven it took 24 minutes i’ve been learning a lot about ovens electric ovens always need a little bit longer convection ovens always lower the temperature by at least 25 degrees and your cook time is going to be way quicker so just always keep an eye on your baked goods if you have a convection oven so i set the timer for 12 minutes i’m gonna turn it and then i’m gonna check it and see if i think i need another 12. i might go a little bit less just to not over bake if you do it might crack a little bit on the top but it still tastes delicious we’ll be back when those come out of the oven [Music] okay as you saw there i set it for another 12 minutes but i stopped it at three because i opened it up and they were no longer jiggly in the middle so that’s when you know they’re done so i only had it 21 minutes if i can do math correctly but unfortunately these have to cool completely before we slice into them so i let them cool on the countertop until they’re like okay to touch basically and then i throw them into the refrigerator so we’ll be back in quite a while to slice these guys up okay it’s time to try some lemon bars pretty sure they’re cooled completely let’s hope and of course the first one’s never gonna come out nice but we’re gonna try hot water so gotta go in half if you’re doing 16 that makes it two carbs each in half and then each one of those in half can not too bad i did those a little bit bigger hot water always helps especially these are super sticky so they’re super gooey and like custardy just like regular lemon bar i did spray the sides of this pan so you know just to make this part easier again corner piece never tends to come out well no matter what gonna come out nicely wow kind of dead pretty nice lemon bar it’s not perfect but came out pretty nice of course i don’t have a plate no i will be dusting these with powdered sugar for the thumbnail but our powdered sweetener does not stay on the lemon bars at all it pretty much melts within 30 minutes or so so it adds a little bit of sweetness but it also adds that little bit of a cooling effect so if you don’t like that or if you’re sensitive to it i wouldn’t dust it with powdered swerve or monkford erythritol now lemon bars i usually lift up and eat as a bar but i’ll be civil and use a fork they’re like it’s super soft and custardy like like it’s like a regular lemon bar like i couldn’t believe it when i got that texture i think it’s the ellilos it’s magical so creamy [Music] just melts in your mouth the crust is a little crispy on bottom so you got nice and crispy tons of lemon zest in there which really packs a punch super tangy hellos isn’t super sweet but it looks perfect and like it tastes like a regular lemon bar i hope you guys enjoy this recipe as much as i have and all my bakery customers have don’t forget to check out my amazon links and the perfect keto link down in the description box below along with the link to the blog post for the full recipe let me know what your favorite summer desserts are down in the comments and give the video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it and as always i’ll be back with many more keto dessert recipes bye guys [Music] [Music] you