Granola from Whole Food Cooking Every Day

October 14, 2021 at 10:35 pm (B plus (3.5 stars, like a lot), breakfast, Grains, Other) (Amy Chaplin)

No one has been a big fan of the last few batches of granola I’ve made, so I wanted to try something new, and I decided to try the base granola recipe from my new cookbook, Whole Food Cooking Every Day. The author, Amy Chaplin, says it makes 15 cups, so I decided to just halve the recipe in case we didn’t like it. I successfully halved everything except the salt. Oy. The granola was inedible. I ended up making another half recipe with no salt and mixing them together, but the final product still tasted quite salty. She calls for fine sea salt and I used table salt. Maybe the sea salt is coarser, and next time I should cut back on the salt? With the saltiness caveat aside, I think I quite like this recipe.

The recipe has an unusual ingredient, which I’ve never put in granola before—raw buckwheat groats. And it has quite a bit. For every 4 cups of rolled oats you add 2 cups of buckwheat groats. I was a little nervous about that, but the final flavor it adds–although buckwheaty–is still pretty mild. And the crunch is lovely.

The recipe also calls for 4(!) cups of unsweetened flaked dried coconut. I used two different kinds of coconut. One was just the big white coconut flakes (called Kokoschips) and the other ones were thicker and had brown edges (from the coconut outside I guess). Both were tasty but but the thick ones were really great. They were actually the only part of the granola that Alma liked. She kept picking them out to munch on.

In addition to the oats, buckwheat, and coconut flakes, which make up the bulk of the granola, the recipe calls for 2 cups of nuts, half of which are whole almonds. I’ve never put whole almonds in granola before. I usually chop them up. But I liked them! The recipe also calls for 2.25 cups of seeds, with a lot of pumpkin seeds, medium amounts of sunflower and sesame seeds, and a small amount of chia seeds.

The recipe calls for 3/4 cup brown rice syrup and 1/2 cup coconut oil 15 cups / 1.5 kg of granola. I found the granola pleasantly sweet without being cloying, but Derek said it wasn’t sweet enough. He wasn’t a big fan.

Another thing that was different about this granola recipe compared to recipes I’ve made in the past is that it’s cooked at a lower temperature (300 F / 150 C), for about 30 minutes. The recipe says to cook it on parchment paper, which I forgot about when I made my second half batch, and oh boy, that was a mistake. It stuck to the pan pretty badly.

In addition to the base recipe she also has a bunch of variations. Most of them call for specialized ingredients which I don’t have, but the turmeric-pumpkin spice variation looks good. It calls for 2 cups (425g) mashed squash along with lots of spices (4 tsp. turmeric, 2 tsp. cinnamon, 2 tsp. ginger, 2 tsp. cardamom, 2 tsp. freshly grated nutmeg, and 1/2 tsp. allspice). Maybe next time I’ll make half a batch of the base recipe and half a batch with the squash and spices.

There are still more breakfast recipes I’d like to try from this cookbook–her “genius whole-grain porridges”, simple compotes, and chia puddings. Maybe also her seeded bars.