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Home-made Granola – Sweet, Crunchy Bliss!

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I haven’t eaten cereal from a box in several years. I used to eat it all the time, but I was experiencing a number of weird symptoms that I simply couldn’t pinpoint. I’d get hungry, irritable, and often my heart would race for no apparent reason. Later, when I linked my symptoms to wheat intolerance and stopped eating it, my symptoms went away.

I was so excited to find out after eating this granola today that I did not experience any of the terrible symptoms I used to get from eating cereal in a box.

It was also great not to feel hungry after eating this wonderful, homemade cereal. It’s loaded with foods that are good for you like pumpkin seeds, walnuts, almonds, dried apples, raisins, coconut, yogurt, coconut oil, and real maple syrup. And since it’s sprouted and dehydrated at a low temperature, it preserves all the important nutrients in this special treat.

This recipe calls for sprouted flour. Sprouted flour is healthier for us because the phytic acid in the grain has been neutralized in the sprouting process, thus making it more digestible. The reason people experience problems with grains is usually because they aren’t properly prepared and cause all kinds of health issues. I can testify to this, and I only eat my grains sprouted or soaked now.

I put the batch in my dehydrator at about 7:50 p.m. last night and turned it on about 150 degrees. My husband checked it early this morning around 7 a.m. and it needed some more drying time. When I opened the door at 11:00 a.m., it was done. I probably could have taken it out an hour or so earlier, but for the first time making granola, it turned out great! Nice and crunchy, not too sweet, and you can definitely taste all the varied flavors in this recipe. Best part? It didn’t leave me hungry an hour later. Bravo!

My son loved it so much, and we both had to stop ourselves from eating the whole batch at once! We are out of raw milk at the moment, but I tried it with our home-made yogurt from raw milk, and it was delicious.

This recipe requires the use of a food dehydrator. The food dehydrator has lower temperature settings than most ovens – the lowest setting on ours only goes down to 170. Dehydrators dry out food while preserving enzymes in the food.

I made this batch of granola from a combination of various recipes I found on the Internet and the one in my food dehydrator book which came with the device.

Ingredients:

  • 3 cups rolled oats
  • 1/2 to 2/3 cups sprouted flour
  • warm water, about three cups
  • about 1 1/2 cups of dried fruit – raisins, cranberries, cherries, mangoes, apples, bananas, whatever you have in your kitchen – we used raisins, apples, and mangoes (apples were from our dried fruit we made a couple of days ago)
  • 1 to 2 cups soaked/sprouted nuts and seeds – we used almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts, pumpkin seeds, cashews, or whatever else you have that would be used in granola
  • 1/2 cup coconut oil
  • 1/4 toΒ  1/2 cup real maple syrup or raw honey – I used maple syrup
  • If you want more sweetness, you can use an additional 1/4 cup of healthy sweetener like sucanat, Lakanto – a naturally fermented sweetener, maple or palm sugar, or Rapadura, but I don’t like overly sweet so I didn’t use anything except maple syrup
  • 1/ cup organic, unsweetened coconut
  • Two pinches of salt
  • 6 – 8 tablespoons of organic yogurt, kefir, whey or other fermented dairy (alternatively you can use apple cider vinegar or lemon juice as well)

Directions:

  1. In advance, mix oats in a bowl with fermented dairy or other acidic compound like apple cider vinegar or lemon juice and warm water.
  2. Cover oats with a kitchen towel and let soak for at least 24 hours. Longer is probably better to reduce phytic acid content and improve digestibility.
  3. When you have checked your oats and they are finished soaking, add other dry ingredients like nuts, dried fruit, sprouted flour, seeds, and coconut. I used a wooden spoon to mix.
  4. Next add all the sweeteners to your mixture (honey/maple syrup/sucanat/Lakanto/Rapadura/palm or maple sugar) – I gently melted my coconut oil in a stainless measuring cup on the stove (on low heat, and it only takes about a minute or two) before including it with the other ingredients. Blend well with the wooden spoon.
  5. Line the trays from your dehydrator with parchment paper and gently spread the mixture onto it. I ended up with about two trays worth of granola mixture in my batch.
  6. After loading your trays, turn the temperature dial on your dehydrator to 150 degrees.
  7. Plug in the device and look at your clock to note the time. You will want to check your granola after about 8 hours, or possibly up to 12 if you are putting it in the dehydrator overnight. We put our granola in the machine after dinner and it was ready by 11 a.m. the following day – which was about 15 hours. The thicker you spread the mixture onto the trays, the longer it will take to complete dehydration.
  8. When your granola has reached the desired crispiness, remove the trays from your dehydrator.
  9. Pull the granola off the parchment paper and break into pieces for eating or storage. We stored ours in a glass container with a lid – and of course, ate some right away!
  10. For serving you can eat it plain, with milk, or yogurt.

11 replies on “Home-made Granola – Sweet, Crunchy Bliss!”

That looks amazing! I switched to soaked/sprouted grains, as well, but still had problems (losing weight, depression, over all not feeling well) I gave up all grains now, for a bit, and I feel better! I’m still worried that soaked grains still block nutrient absorbtion. I guess you could say the jury is still out on grains for me. I’m of European and Cheoroke decent. I am having trouble pin pointing my nutritional type.
But that does look good! Thanks!

Hi Amber – I know what you mean about grains. I had trouble with them for so long, and I also wonder about nutrients not being absorbed with grains. I think some people do better on them than others – but the best way to eat them at all is definitely soaked. I am finding that as time goes on, the more I prepare grains at home, the easier it is for me to eat them. But I am still sparing with them and tend to eat them only every few days. I have some of the same background in my ancestry as you do – Cherokee and differing paths of European descent, including Irish, Welsh, and German. I think each person has to do what is best for him or her in diet, as there is no one-size fits all…except I still believe that in general, the closer to nature any food is, the better. πŸ™‚

It sounds absolutely delicious! Thank you so much for showing me this post. It just re-affirms the fact that I really need to get a dehydrator! But yes, I agree with you on the sprouting and soaking. Like your other commenter, the jury is still out for me too, but I am still experimenting!

Jenn – I love my dehydrator so much, and I’ve only used it twice so far. I am going to try to make something in it as least once or twice a month. I think my next project will be beef jerky. I really can’t wait for that because it will be a snack I won’t feel guilty at all about eating, as I do a bit if I eat too much granola since my tolerance for grains is not terribly high. Experimentation is definitely the order of the day! πŸ™‚

Raine, this looks so yummy. I have a lot of soaking, sprouting, and dehydrating to do! First wheat berries, then nuts! As far as soaking flour, the jury is still out for me to. I was a bit disappointed to hear that the research on that may not be accurate and still waiting for confirmation either way. I’ll definitely have to try this!

Hi Raine – Somehow I am not seeing oatmeal in the ingredients. I am familiar with soaking grains but not flour. How does that work? Don’t you end up with paste? I don’t think I have a local source for sprouted flour and, being in Canada, may not have an easy Internet source.

Hello Kit – I am so sorry, as it appears, I completely forgot the oats in the recipe! I have fixed that and now it should read “3 cups of rolled oats” and “1/2 to 2/3 cup flour”. When you are working with flour, if you have sprouted flour, you don’t need to soak. If you have regular flour, you can soak it. Here is my post about soaked grains:

https://agriculturesociety.com/?p=1597

This post has a list of sprouted grains and flour to purchase both at various stores and from Internet merchants.

As for soaking flour – yes, it becomes wet when soaking before adding it to your recipe for cooking, but before it goes in the oven or on the stove most conventional recipes call for adding liquid of some type to your flour anyway – which turns it into a type of paste, as you described. The purpose of soaking before cooking simply reduces the phytic acid content so that when you cook it for eating, valuable nutrients aren’t lost.

I hope that helps! πŸ™‚

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