Breakfast Briefs: Granola
(Welcome to Breakfast Briefs. If you’re like me, you find yourself rushing out the door hungry and undercaffeinated many a morning, the inevitable result of which is $6 spent on a bad egg sandwich and coffee fit only for war criminals. In these posts, I’m going to share my tips and tricks for getting to work fed without adding more than 5 or 10 minutes to your morning routine.)
The peculiar adjective “crunchy granola” is often applied to people with generally “slow” sensibilities about food. Now I understand why: Homemade granola is amazingly simple, cheap as dirt, and twice as good as any store-bought version. Anybody who cares about what they’re eating (and at least kind of likes granola) should try making it.
Its constituent ingredients keep pretty much forever and are things you ought to have in your pantry anyway. Once it’s done, granola keeps in a ziploc bag or tupperware for much longer than it will take you to eat it. (In the interest of fact-checking, I tried to actually find out how long granola will keep. No one seems to know. I found answers varying from one week to six months. I’m guessing about a month and am going to keep eating mine until I have a good reason not to. Anybody have any actual knowledge here?)
It’s good with yogurt, milk, or just by itself. Spend just 45 minutes making a batch of granola and you’ll have several weeks’ worth of breakfasts at your fingertips.
I particularly like granola because it’s a breakfast that I can just have ready to go at work. I keep some at my desk and some yogurt in the fridge so that when I wake up late, I can shower, grab a cup of coffee, and bolt for the subway, knowing that a good breakfast will be waiting for me.
My first granola experiment was inspired by a post by the Amateur Gourmet, and I’m deeply in debt to Adam Roberts (the eponymous gourmet) for turning me on to what will now be a staple of my kitchen. The recipe below is a slightly tweaked version of the one he used (which, in turn, was from “Baked: New Frontiers in Baking” by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito of the Baked Bakery in Red Hook)
The critical ingredient here is actually the salt. Too little and your granola is likely to be blasé, and nobody wants blasé granola.
Crunchy Granola for Dirty Hippies and Everyone Else
2 1/2 cups rolled oats
1/4 cup vegetable or canola oil
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2 tsps. cinnamon
1-2 tsps. salt
Nuts of your choosing
Dried Fruit of your choosing
1. Preheat oven to 325. Combine oil, honey, sugar, vanilla, cinnamon, and salt in a large bowl. Add oats and toss to coat. The mixture should be sticky, but not dripping with liquid.
2. Spread the granols in a thin layer on a wax or parchment paper line baking sheet or dish. (I used a dish, which I liked because I could easily spread and mix the granola without spilling any.) Place in oven.
3. Cooking time is about 25-30 minutes, but there’s plenty of wiggle room. Take the pan out every ten minutes or so and mix the granola around to prevent sticking. Taste regularly, keeping in mind that things will crisp up when it cools. The granola shouldn’t brown, and the pan on the right above is actually overdone. It was still really good.
4. If your nuts are untoasted add them toward the end of cooking so that they have time to toast but don’t burn. Add toasted nuts and dried fruit after you remove the granola from the oven.
Sounds and looks good!
For the laziest among us, any suggestions on good fruits and nuts to add?
Certainly:
Raisins
Cranberries
Cherries
Almonds
Hazelnuts
…
I like muesli in the morning as well…it is ridiculously expensive to buy, but making it costs virtually nothing. Nigella’s recipe is the one that I tend to use…
Would it be practical and effective to replace the honey with a plant-based alternative, such as molasses or possibly sorghum?
Hm. You could try molasses, but no guarantees. I’ve never done anything with sorghum myself.
What I think you could confidently do is use just a combination of brown sugar and oil. You might need to tweak the ratios a little, but I’m sure it would be fine.
Nachy- maybe agave nectar?
I just tried making this and I followed all the directions, and sadly my first attempt yielded me incredibly salty granola burnt to a crisp at minute 12 in the cooking process. I tried again: still somewhat salty, though I used only 1 tsp salt, and less burnt at minute 18 once I lowered oven temp to 350. I looked up other granola recipes online and saw that most used an oven temperature of about 300, some as low as 250. I really wanted this granola recipe to work, but I think it needs some major tweaking and a DRASTIC change in oven temperature and amount of salt before that will happen. hmmm…
Yipes! I am totally chagrined. The recipe should have (and now does) read *325* not 375. Lower temps should be fine as well, but will take a bit longer.
As for the salt, it’s a matter of taste. I confess that I didn’t carefully measure out 2 tsps., but I’m pretty confident that that’s where I ended up. I’ve changed the recipe to a range to be safe.
Thanks for keeping me honest, Sam, and my apologies for the burnt granola!
I’d suggest keeping the salt to 1 tsp. I make a similar recipe using 9 cup oats, 1 c honey and 1 c oil, plus ~1/2 cup of mixed flax seeds, sesame seeds and wheat germ. So, it’s roughly 4x your recipe. For this amount, I use 3 tsp of kosher salt. I’ve never found that more salt is needed.
Hi,
I tried this and it came out fine except that its not glued together. What is the component that holds all the ingriedient together? may be I can increase its quantity.
Thanks a lot for posting this simple receipe.
I believe that the honey/brown sugar is what really glues things together, but keep in mind that this recipe is for granola, not granola bars…
I just made this. Heedless of the warnings of previous commenters, I did not add too much salt and did not overbake. It is incredibly delicious.
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