On Granola and Clusters

Granola is just an oven roasted version of its muesli cousin, but the two cereals vary enormously in price for reasons that aren't entirely clear. My favorite person to cook with, Melissa, hypothesized that the delicious sugar concentrated clusters present uniquely in granola contributed to the lofty price. At upwards of $6/lbs for storebought (way higher for local coffeeshop varieties), we decided to try and replicate granola from scratch. Of particular interest were the clusters. In the end, we used combinations of three or four main recipes, and isolated three basic granola cooking methods - two with fully functional clusters. As far as I know, no one has outlined these methods in one place.

It turns out granola has a negligible history, invented in the 18th century, but not popular until the late 1960s. Wikipedia has more to say about the legal battles involving granola than anything else.

As far as price, we were able to make a lot of granola for a fraction of the store-bought price. We got to choose what went inside, and what didn't. The only expensive ingredient was maple syrup, whose cost can be offset by buying large volumes at a time. I'll update this blog with an exact price, but so far the granola disappears before we get a chance to weigh it.

Without further ado, the recipes:

Bare Granola (pictured above)
(this recipe uses the bare minimum ingredients and makes no clusters. It's still fantastic and probably the healthiest of the three.)

Ingredients
+ 3 cups rolled oats
+ 1/2-3/4 cup flaxseed, coconut shavings, slivered almonds, sunflower seeds
+ whatever omega-3, entropy-lowering miracle grains you desire.
+ 1/4-1/3 cup brown sugar (granulated sugar works)
+ 1/4-1/3 cup maple syrup (Aunt Jemima's is NOT maple syrup.)
+ Some honey doesn't hurt at all.
+ dash of salt (unless the sunflowers are already salted)
+ deepish baking sheet

Preperation
Preheat Oven to 250F/120C/394K

Mix together all the ingredients until homogeneous and isotropic. Any two points in the granola should be statistically indistinguishable, and the granola-to-flax-seed ratio distribution should be Gaussian. Use as much sugar as you desire.

Spread out directly onto (clean?) baking sheet, two if necessary. Shove it into the oven for 1h15m stirring every 10 or 15 minutes, until nicely toasted. Remove, enjoy.

Serving
Milk, Yogurt, Oatmeal, or by itself. For this bare recipe, I think I prefer eating it as a snack by itself.
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Healthy Cluster Granola
(This method was adapted from the Kitchn blog. It's my personal favorite, and probably healthier than the conventional cluster method.)

Ingredients
+ Bare Granola
+ 1-2 egg whites
+ More Patience

Preperation
Starts the same as the bare granola recipe (preheat 250F).. Mix together all your ingredients. Then in a separate bowl, whisk together egg whites until frothy, and add it to the granola mixture. Then cook as described in the previous recipe.

Then, as a crucial last step, after you take it out of the oven, do not touch it for at least an hour, while the entire pan cools down and the clusters form.
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Conventional Cluster Granola
(This seems to be the method used by the store-bought granola recipes. Looking at the ingredients in the bulk granolas as Henry's or Whole Foods, you will almost always find some kind of flour high on the list.)

Ingredients
+ Bare Granola ingredients
+ 1/2 cup flour
+ 1/2 cup butter (1 stick) (You could try olive oil instead)
+ Less Patience

Preperation
Higher temperature this time. (preheat 325F). Mix together the dry ingredients, including the flour. Melt the maple syrup and butter in the microwave (be careful, it gets hot and boils very quickly;

Stir together the resulting mixtures, put it on the baking sheet, and stuff it in the oven. After 10 minutes, stir/flip granola, and bake for another ten minutes. Because the oven is hotter (required to cook the butter-flour mixture) the granola will get warm more quickly.

This recipe is less healthy for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is the stick of butter (don't try cutting it down, it wont work, I tried. You can try olive oil instead of butter). In addition, the high cooking temperature probably denatures more of the healthy-particles than the other methods. Finally, the flour texture adds a graininess to the clusters which I find mildly unpleasant.

Enjoy!

Groats of Oats and Savory Oatmeal

There's something magical about how one raw steel cut oat can absorb four times its volume in water.

My roommates and I have recently really gotten back into oatmeal. In retrospect, I can come up with many reasons - it's cheap, nutritious, fast and simple to make. The El Niño Winter rains have given us even more excuses to eat something warm and comforting.

Given my recent investment in oatmeal, I've uncovered a few gems and factoids that I would like to share with you, which can be summed up in the sentence: Oatmeal is whole grain hulled groats of oats, traditionally cooked with a spurtle.

What are oats? | Lets start where I started - at the basics. Oats (Avena sativa) come from a cereal grain, which is just a fancy way of saying that they are grown for their seed. Oats are grown all over the world - almost 25 million metric tons a year according to the UN FAO. Like most of our grains, the majority of oats grown goes directly to livestock.

How is oatmeal made from oats? | All oatmeal is made from groats of oats, the shelled, or hulled, grain that comes from the oat crop. Steel-cut means what it says - the grains are then cut into smaller pieces. Rolled oats are first flattened then steamed to decrease cooking time. I'm not going to comment about the nutritional value of one over the other. Both are awesome nutritionally - to find out more, check out what alpha has to say.

Gem #1: The art of oatmeal requires a spurtle! No - it's not a pokemon! It's a cooking utensil that deserves its own drawer. It's definitely going on my wishlist. You can buy them hand-made online, or find out what food bloggers have to say. With a little marketing, Crate and Barrel could bring these back!

Gem #2: This will get its own post in the near future, but you can make savory oatmeal! For too long, oatmeal has been banned to the constrictive, sweetened world of breakfast. But, like any cereal grain, it's fine for any meal. I tried cooking dinner with oatmeal for the first time a week ago - it was fantastic! The cooking experience was surreal - I cringed as I added garlic and broccoli to the boiling oatmeal. I felt a strange, internal conflict as I grated Parmesan on top of my plate of oatmeal before digging in.

For recipes, search Google for "savory oatmeal recipes" or check out a recipe from Mark Bittman on savory oatmeal that he shared with NPR. Alternatively - I would encourage readers to just go for it - make something from your imagination. Free oatmeal from part of this complete breakfast.