Granola

I remember back in the '80s, everyone seemed to go wild for granola. I think it may have been around the same time as the Rice Cake Craze. The problem is, people were buying granola. And while this may be a bit of an exaggeration, storebought granola is much closer in flavor to a rice cake than it is to homemade granola.

Granola is, as you may have come to expect from me, relatively easy to make and very easy to customize. There's one place in the whole process where you might run into trouble, but that's easily caught if you think about it ahead of time. For granola, you have three sets of ingredients: dry roasted, wet, and dried fruits.

The dry roasted starts with a base of oats. You want average, everyday rolled oats here. No instant oats, no pinhead/steel cut oats. Just rolled oats. Let's say 3 cups for the sake of argument. Add to that some things to roast. For 3 cups worth of oats, I tend to go with 2 cups of Nuts of Choice (in this case cashew, almonds, macadamia, and hazlenut; none of those should have much salt on them, and get versions that are sliced, crushed, or slivered), somewhat more than 3/4 cups of dried coconut, and 3/4-ish cups of brown sugar. In a ratio, this would be 12 parts oats, 8 parts nuts, 3 parts coconut, and 3 parts brown sugar, but frankly if you spend more than a tiny amount of effort measuring all this, you are Working Too Hard.

Mix all that together. If you have it, use a ridiculously oversized stainless steel bowl. Every kitchen large enough to support it should have one.

For the wet stuff, let's go with 3/4 cup each of vegetable oil and maple syrup, as well as a teaspoon-ish of salt. That's 3 parts each of the oil and syrup. You can use another liquid sweetener if you'd like, and you have some flexibility on oils. I'd skip anything too heavily flavored, though.

Mix that up in a smaller bowl.

Add the wet stuff to the dry and mix. I use my hands for all the mixing.

Place onto as many cookie sheets as you need so that you have a relatively thin layer, such as:

Bake in a 250° oven. Every 15 minutes, take out the pans, stir everything, swap top to bottom, and rotate 180°. Okay, the rotating is silly, but the idea is to ensure that if you have any hotspots, that you won't burn your granola. If you have a convection oven, you could very well be okay with just keeping things in until they're browned.

Be warned: this is the trickiest step, and it's not that tricky. Don't burn your granola, which mostly means stir it and keep things on the middle shelf or higher. Don't put the pan near the bottom of the oven. Doom and burning lie that path. In any case, do the 15 minute thing 4 times, for a total of 1:15 of baking. If they look like they're golden brown and delicious early, fantastic, take it out, let it cool a bit, add in any dried fruits (such as, in my case, some dried sweetened cranberries, which I neglected to measure but was probably int he 3/4 cup range) and enjoy. If it looks to need some more time, then cook for a bit longer, but be careful not to burn it. It'll look something like:

Or, if you separate it out and put it into a ziptop bag, it'll look something like:

And, for the record, it is so much better fresh than any granola you will buy. Go on, try it. Mmmmm. You can customize it just about any way you want, but I have to warn you: M&Ms are not a good addition to this granola. I know you think I'm crazy, as do I, but I tried it, and the chocolate overwhelms the granola. You will probably ignore me and put some M&Ms in at the dried fruit stage, which is certainly your right. However, I recommend doing a test run first. Take a handful of unchocolated granola and a few M&Ms and eat that handful. If you love it, go ahead and add the M&Ms. If not, you've saved yourself the trouble of picking out all of the candy beforehand.

For the official recipe, I've simplified the ratios, because 12:8:3:3:3:3:3 seemed like a silly ratio, and also to emphasize that this is not a high-precision thing we're doing. Add more nuts; don't add as many nuts; don't add nuts at all. Play with it. Make it your own. If you do everything just like I have, you will probably love it, but you will probably love it even more if you made it exactly with the ingredients you like. If you stumble across a winning combination, by all means post it in the comments. We love to hear about good variations to our recipes.

Granola

Note: The base recipe is 4 cups of oats, with everything else following.

Ingredients

• 4 parts rolled oats
• 2 parts nuts, chopped, slivered, crushed, or sliced
• 1 part brown sugar
• 1 part dried coconut
• 1 part vegetable oil
• 1 part maple syrup (or agave nectar, or honey, or simple syrup, or whatever is handy)
• Salt (1 tsp for every 4 cups of oats)
• 1 part dried fruit

Directions

• Preheat oven to 250°.
• Mix oats, nuts, coconut, and brown sugar (the Dry Ingredients) in a large bowl.
• Mix oil, syrup, and salt (the Wet Ingredients) in a small bowl
• Mix Wet and Dry ingredients together in the large bowl.
• Spread out onto baking sheets
• Bake at 250°F for 15 minutes. Remove from oven, stir.
• Repeat the previous step 4 times, or until oats and coconut look toasty.
• Remove from oven, add dried fruits, and let cool a bit.
• Share and enjoy.

Comments

[Jess]

I made this last night. One issue that I had was that it was very wet -- I ended up cooking it for over a half hour more than you suggested. But other than that it was fun. It's pretty sweet for my taste, so if I make it again I think I'll cut pretty far back on the sugar. Pic: http://www.flickr.com/photos/56819565@N00/5021389141/

[Jess]

For the record, it was still delicious and I completely plan to make it again. I think it'd be great with dried blueberries, but they're pretty expensive.

[Brian]

Thank you, Jess. I know what I did wrong, and will retool the proportion based recipe for weight. I think if you dropped back down to 3/4 cup or so each of oil and syrup, it would be proper. Maybe 7/8 cup.

My version with hazelnuts and macadamia nuts is definitely spendy, but my wife and I are worth it. I think a bit of blueberry would be a fine addition. Plus, they are a superfood, so I hear.