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.

Real Food Pot Luck

Last week I organized a potluck and invited friends from two social circles. I wanted to share a time-lapse of the potluck.

Butternut Squash Overload.

Hello again, world wide web.

So three weeks ago, I made the mistake of buying a rather phallic, six pound butternut squash from the Farmer's Market. I planned on only getting a sweet pumpkin, but my favorite squash seller only had butternut. Of course, I was suspicious when he said that butternut was often used instead of butternut squash. I didn't commit to buying the squash until another consumer at the farmer's market asked if I would use the squash to make pie. Maybe they were working as a team. In any case, I ended up with two feet of awesome butternut squash.

It made a nice mantle piece for about a week, until I cut it in half, gutted the entrails, and baked it face down in the oven for about an hour. Then I scooped each half out with a spoon and stuffed it into two rather large tupperware. It took almost two weeks of cooking with butternut squash every other day to get rid of it.

Still, I'm not sick of it. Butternut squash is versatile and lean and delicious in dessert or main dish, and not that painful to prepare. I was able to use it in soup, muffins, pie, and risotto. I wish I had made some butternut squash bread.

I stopped writing over summer, but I haven't stopped cooking. I'll try to post more regularly.

Poor Herbivore

Scurvy, crabs (not for eating), and scoliosis are just some of the many risks associated with being an undergrad. But a more serious condition is afflicting a gross chunk of the student population: covert vegetarianism.

Yes, its true, many avoid meat by choice, claiming to be demonstrating against animal cruelty, methane emission, hormone abuse, or avoiding cholesterol, cancer, bad karma. It's crazy what sick rationalizations people come up with to avoid embarrassment of the true cause of vegetarianism: fiscal restriction.

Perhaps more disturbing, many students do not even realize they are affected. Indeed, I didn't even know I was a college vegetarian until , upon coming home and having dinner with the family, I realized I had forgotten what meat tasted like. The spectrum of taste cannot be filled by only meat or only vegetables.

Can I liken self-proclaimed vegetarians to supporters of abstinence-only sex-ed? Maybe that's going too far, but at least I will admit to being fiscally strained, instead of hiding behind a thinly veiled masquerade of so-called ethics.

Food and Finals

Since I only started cooking this quarter, I did not really know how crunch time would affect my eating habits. I figured that cooking would be a great way to procrastinate. Unfortunately, studying got the better of me, and my kitchen has been neglected. I've been surviving on left overs stretched with free food from clubs and parties... (If you have facebook, here's ridiculous proof.)

This morning's farmer's market was a reminder that I've been neglecting my diet. I'm making up for it by cooking two servings of swordfish smothered in a home made onion-tomato spread. One for dinner, one for later on this week.

I feel like left-overs have a negative stigma - and when you're not cooking for yourself, its obvious why: its redundant, not as fresh, and non-uniformly heated by a microwave that infuses the smell of whatever was reheated previously. If we keep in mind the satisfaction equilibrium, though, the time saved makes left-overs invaluable. So when finals are around the corner, double the recipe, and refer to parents for expiration dates.

Crème Brûlée

One of my favorite desserts is crème brûlée, literally "burnt cream" in French. This 500 year old dessert is definitely not an ideal healthy quick dish for college students, but its a great way to impress friends with a expensive sounding dish.
My dad usually buys prepared crème brûlée from the supermarket. Over the last couple of years, he's accumulated over 3 dozen ramekins - the dishes crème brûlée is baked in. Since he's running out of space for dishes, I thought I would try making the dessert from scratch, and reusing the ramekins. If you do not have ramekins, there are often some hanging out in thrift stores. Any oven-safe shallow bowl will do.

This recipe is from cross referencing different sources online.

Crème Brûlée  (three ramekins)

Ingredients
+ 2 cups heavy cream (or 1 cup milk, 1 cup heavy cream for less richness)
+ 1 ts vanilla extract (optional)
+ 3 egg yolks
+ 1/2 cup granulated sugar
+ 3 ramekins
+ deep baking dish

Preperation
Start heating the cream in a pot over the stove. *Turn off the stove when the cream starts boiling, and let it hang out for 10 minutes.* While it begins heating, mix the three egg yolks and the sugar in a bowl, mixing long enough to incorporate a little air. The mixture should lighten in color a little bit. (In the photo, notice the different in color between the beaten mixture and the yolk on the side of the bowl). If you have vanilla, add it into the egg mixture. 

While the cream cools, preheat the oven to 325 degrees, slowly add it to the egg mixture while stirring continuously. Now, split this mixture between three ramekins (I was able to make 3.5, but it depends on the size of your ramekins). Here's the tricky part- put the ramekins in the deep baking dish, then add water to the dish until the water level lies a little under the tops of the ramekins. (I used bigger ramekins for each ramekin, but the principle is the same.) Now shove them in the oven around forty minutes so that they set. Check on them often. They're ready when a fork comes out clean when you stick it an inch from the edge of the ramekin. They will still be jiggly. Mine had a few brown spots, but were mostly uniform. Let them cool off outside the oven, then refrigerate them. They take 20 minutes to prepare before serving. They last about 2 days in the fridge. Freezing them will let them last longer.

Serving
I'll assume you dont have a torch to caramelize the sugar. Sprinkle less than a tablespoon of sugar over the top of each ramekin. Broil them on the oven. Within a few minutes, the sugar will melt and caramalize. Check often, and pull them out when the sugar has been boiling for 3-4 minutes, or when the top is browning. Pull them out, let them cool off for five minutes before serving.