We Have So Many Opinions About Granola

(so many)

Hello, you’re reading, “Yes, I Am A Hungry Woman.” I hope you have a lovely time here. Want to stick around?

Photo by Olena Sergienko on Unsplash

I spent Monday morning last week at a coffee shop with a great book (The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See), a bowl of yogurt, and some “house-made” granola. As I ate breakfast, I admired the coffee shop’s homemade granola the way you admire something commonplace that you suddenly think to appreciate. Your sense of taste after a particularly bad head-cold, maybe, or waking up well-rested after a week of poor sleep. This granola was toasty, both sweet and salty enough, and perfectly crisp. It also lost points for lacking enough clusters (the payload of the essential granola experience) and enough nuts, and for containing dried fruit, which we’ll discuss later on.

I guess I’d kind of forgotten about granola for a while. I forgot how much I enjoy it, how easy it is to make, how easy it is to personalize, and how much razzle-dazzle it adds to a bowl of plain Greek yogurt. For at least a year straight my only breakfast was yogurt, fruit, and Simply Elizabeth granola. Then I got little out-yogurted and put a pause on daily consumption, which put a pause on purchasing granola, which effectively removed it from my general consciousness. And how many years had it been since I’d made granola? And why had I stopped? And and and and…suddenly I was very granola-aware. We might call this past week my granola reawakening.

One thing I can be relied upon to supply is a plethora of unsolicited opinions. So when I took to Instagram stories this week to describe my ideal homemade granola (and ask for recipes), no one was surprised at my specificity: I wanted granola that was chunky but still crumbly, conspicuously short on almonds, lightly sweet without being very sweet, but not so lightly sweet that it tasted like something you’d find in the nosebag of a Central Park carriage horse. It couldn’t have dried fruit (gets too hard when cold) but it needed to have nuts but not so many nuts that you couldn’t taste the oats but not so many oats that you felt scammed on nut levels.

I feel high-maintenance just typing that.

But if you are going to bother making something from scratch (and therefore be responsible for eating the whole batch yourself), it had better meet your criteria! Thankfully, my slightly fastidious granola parameters were met with gracious “me too” responses. Your preferences might match or depart from mine, but it remained consistent across all fronts: we are an opinionated granola people and proud of it. Many of you shared your recipes with me, others merely voted for a universal sharing of granola research when I had found the recipe I wanted to use. A few leading qualities emerged: we like chunks in our granola, we don’t like a fussy recipe, we do like it a small bit sweet, and we do like it to contain oats versus being a grain-free sort.

Armed with opinions, methods, suggested recipes, and a kitchen drawer full of various nuts and seeds that wanted using up, I hove to. The result was an easy and delicious batch of coffee-house-worthy granola. You can use almost any type of nut in your batch, but here is my ranking of the commonly-available nuts, listed from my own favorite to least-favorite:

1.) Pecans

2.) Pistachios

3.) Cashews

4.) Walnuts

5.) Hazelnuts

6.) Peanuts

7.) Almonds

I like almond flavor, and I love an almond croissant or almonds in many other contexts. However, there is something about the idea of snacking on handfuls of almonds that totally turns my stomach, and I can’t really tell you why. I think it’s an over-consumption of almonds in my disordered eating days. Nevertheless, a handful of flaked almonds hanging around from another recipe did make it into this batch and that is that on inclusivity and cleaning house.

After some consideration I decided to pseudo-follow Bon Appetit’s Grain-Free Tahini Granola. They get credit for the initial idea, although I changed basically everything about the details. I think the beauty of granola is that you can tinker with it so successfully. Add or subtract nearly any of the dry components (and even some of the wet) and you’ll still end up with a delicious batch. The result of this recipe-adjusting was a fat kimchi jar of homemade granola, perfect for breakfast or sprinkling over ice cream and warm fruit compote: a lazy girl’s fruit crisp a la mode, if you will. This recipe is naturally vegan, dairy-free, refined-sugar-free, and gluten-free (as long as you buy gluten-free oats) and the nut-to-oats ratio makes it pretty high protein for a granola.

Below, I’m sharing the recipe the way I made it, but I promise that whatever ingredients you have in your cabinet are just fine. Frankly, I don’t want to hear reports of anybody shopping expressly for this recipe. You don’t need to - cross my heart. The beauty of granola, as stated, is that you can MacGyver it using all the saddest, most random ends of bags of nuts and oats. You can use tahini or a runny nut butter. You can replace the honey and mulberry syrup with maple syrup, or pomegranate molasses. (In fact, I used mulberry syrup only because I had it lying around, but pomegranate molasses is far more widely available.) You can add coconut flakes, or subtract some of the nuts. You can even use almonds if you must, or throw in dark chocolate at the end when it cools. Whatever your platonic granola ideal is, this can become that thing. The result is a happy ratio of chunks-to-crumbles with an addictive toasty flavor. I love it a lot and will probably make another batch as soon as this one is gone.

Anyway, this one is for us. Thanks for hanging out with granola and me and sharing your own thoughts on Granolagate 2023!

Toasty Homemade Granola

2 cups mixed raw nuts, roughly chopped - I used pecans and cashews with a pinch of sliced almonds

2 cups rolled oats - I used a brand that also had added chia seeds

1/8 cup honey (can substitute with maple syrup)

1/8 cup mulberry syrup (can substitute with maple syrup)

1/4 cup tahini

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 1/4 tsp. kosher salt

1/2 tsp. cinnamon

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. In a large bowl mix together dry ingredients. In a smaller bowl whisk together wet ingredients till smooth.

2. Combine the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients and mix till incorporated. Spread in a single layer on the prepared baking sheet and place in the oven.

3. Bake for 15 minutes, then stir the granola. Rotate the tray and bake for another 15-20 minutes. It will still appear soft when you take it from the oven, but will harden as it cools.

4. Remove from the oven, allow to cool, and then break into pieces and store in an airtight container at room temperature.

P.S. August 29th marks the one year birthday of Yes, I Am A Hungry Woman! It’s hard to believe we have been spending Monday mornings together for nearly a year. Stay tuned for fun birthday shenanigans! <3