Many years ago I ran into a granola recipe in the old Gourmet magazine (now gone, alas) called “Sherry’s Granola.” I have followed its basic concept for many years, tweaking it and generalizing it until I can call it my own. Granola is a great kitchen-sink item, and as you’ll see below it’s more of a procedure than a recipe.
You may be surprised at the amount of sweetener called for, a whole cupful of maple syrup (not pancake syrup, puh-leeze!) or honey, since these recipes are for the most part low- or no-sugar.
I figured it all out: If you have 12 cups of dry ingredients and 1 cup of sweetener, then each cup of granola would have 1/12 of a cup, or 2/3 of an ounce, or four teaspoons, or about 16 grams, of sugar. Remember the 20-pounds-per-year/25-grams-per-day rule. (I just looked up Quaker Oats granola and it has 26 grams of sugar per cup. And, as I’ve said on many occasions, I used to put 25 grams of sugar in my morning cup of coffee, thus effectively using up my sugar allowance for the day right then and there.) So your reasonable one-cup serving of this granola would still be well under your sugar maximum for the day, but you’d have to be really restrained about any other sugar consumption. As I say in the intro, you shouldn’t think in terms of anything longer than a per-day stretch when you’re watching your sugar intake. It’s too easy to cheat, at least for people like me, if you’re always thinking, “Okay, well, tomorrow I have to be really restrained if I eat this today.” Tomorrow never comes. And you’re feeding your sweet tooth, and you’re making your body pump out extra insulin.
Having said all that, I will also say that a batch of this cereal ready to go in the freezer is just great. I personally can’t stand the thought of eating eggs every single morning, and I love eggs. My recipe has lots of protein from the nuts and the seeds. You don’t have to add any dried fruit if you don’t like it. (I don’t worry about the sugar content of that ingredient.) During most of the year I just have it with some milk or plain yogurt. No honey drizzles, please! It’s absolutely the best with sliced fresh peaches, though. But that version is only possible for a month or so out of the year. You could certainly eat it with any other fresh fruit, if you like. I’m not much of a fruit person. Anyway, here it is.
DEBI’S GRANOLA
This is a very loose recipe, more a set of directions than anything else. You can vary it according to your taste. The basic technique for making any kind of granola is to have some sort of grain base (usually oatmeal), a liquid sweetener, and an oil. Other ingredients—nuts, seeds, dried fruit—are added as desired. A one-cup serving will give you about 16 grams of your 25-gram sugar allowance for the day.
Ingredients
First, the basic mix:
- 5-6 cups old-fashioned oatmeal Use the larger amount if you're worried about having enough. Don’t use that horrible quick or instant stuff.
- 1 cup maple syrup or honey or a combination thereof. I use half each. There are other liquid sweeteners you could use, I guess, but these seem the most granola-y to me. I wouldn’t use something really strong-tasting such as molasses.
- 1/2 cup oil I use coconut oil if I'm including coconut and peanut oil if not but coconut oil is fine for any version.
- 1 tsp . salt
- 1 tsp . vanilla
To this you can add ingredients from the following list. At some point, if you kept adding things, you’d have too much of the dry ingredients to be coated by the wet ones. I’d say limit yourself to three or four of these:
- 1-2 cups unsweetened dried coconut You'll have to go to some kind of natural-foods store such as Sprouts or Vitamin Cottage, to get this.
- 1 cup hulled raw pumpkin seeds Ditto this ingredient.
- 1/2 cup flax seed Ditto this ingredient.
- 1/2 cup sesame seeds Pref. unhulled. Ditto on the above ingredient.
- 1 cup raw wheat germ
- 2 cups whole natural almonds You can leave them whole or chop coarsely.
- 2 cups pecans
- 1-2 cups sunflower seeds
Instructions
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Preheat oven to 35Mix dry ingredients except salt in a LARGE bowl. Mix liquid ingredients and salt together. I find it helpful to heat the liquid mixture in the microwave for a minute or two. Stir the liquid thoroughly to dissolve the salt and mix the oil and sweetener together. Pour this over dry ingredients, then mix and mix and MIX until each and every kernel, nut and seed is coated. Spread out in two large rimmed cookie sheets. Bake for 10 minutes, take out, stir, switch positions in oven, bake for 5 more minutes, stir again, check for doneness—mixture should be golden brown and nuts toasted lightly. It will probably need about 5 minutes more. Don't overbake. It’s much better to keep baking in short increments and checking than to ruin a whole batch. The mixture will not seem very crispy—it will get more crispy as it cools.
After the granola has cooled, you can mix in any of the following to taste:
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Chopped dates I use the date bits you can get at Sprouts or similar stores--the ones that are actually extruded ground-up dates dusted with oat flour. They're much cheaper than regular dates.
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Raisins (Yuck!)
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Dried cranberries
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Currants (which are just small raisins, but for some reason I like those)
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Other dried fruit
Recipe Notes
If you make a big batch it’s a good idea to store it in the freezer, as there are a fair number of ingredients that can go rancid on you if left too long at room temp. Great with milk or yogurt for breakfast, with added fruit or honey if desired.
