Granola is marketed as a healthy breakfast choice and I wanted to try it for many years. As you can read in my previous post, a healthier lifestyle has been my goal for several years now, so I thought: Yes! This is a good and healthy choice for breakfast. Let’s get some yogurt, and fresh fruits and top it off with some tasteful and healthy granola.
So for the past couple of years I, off and on, used to eat yogurt with some fruit and a crunchy breakfast cereal in the morning. I always thought this was a nice breakfast to start the day but when looking at the ingredient list it is less healthy than I always expected it to be. It is often baked in some kind of oil, has added sugars, and never the variety of nuts I wanted. And besides all that, it is very expensive compared to regular muesli and other cereals.
I, therefore, was very pleased to see a Gordon Ramsay recommendation in my YouTube feed, in which he made a very easy tasteful homemade granola. In this clip Gordon made the whole recipe look so easy that I thought everyone would be able to make this lovely homemade granola!
With this new blog in mind and my newly found mission to live healthier, I decided to give it a shot and immediately wrote down the ingredients on my shopping list. I then looked up some other recipes, adjusted my shopping list, checked my kitchen cabinets for ingredients, adjusted my shopping list again, saw another recipe, and adjusted the shopping list again. You might say I’m a bit chaotic sometimes.
What is granola?
Granola is a popular choice for breakfast. It mainly consists of rolled oats, a variety of nuts, a sweetener, seeds, dried fruits, and/or a topping like coconut flakes or chocolate drops.
The sweetener used is often honey or maple syrup. Granola is, mostly, oven baked. To add a crunch to it some sort of oil is added like coconut oil before it is baked in the oven.
You can eat granola as a topping of your yogurt, milk, or smoothie or add it as a constituent in baked goods like cookies, cakes, and such.
Is granola healthy?
Granola is not per definition a healthy choice. When you buy granola in the supermarket it is often baked in seed oils, it is (over) sweetened, and contains more oats than healthy nuts.
If you make granola at home you choose all the ingredients so you can sweeten it with honey, maple syrup, or not. You can bake it in coconut oil, or not. And you can pick your own set of nuts.
Enough chit-chat for now, you’ll find the recipe I followed to make my lovely homemade granola below!
Baking Supplies
- Bowl
- Saucepan
- Spoon
- Oven (180 °C/356 °F)
- Baking tray
- Parchment paper
- Jar (air-tight)
Ingredients:
- 300 gram rolled oats
- 200 gram honey
- 95 gram hazelnuts
- 100 gram almonds
- 75 gram sunflower seeds
- 75 gram pumpkin seeds
- 70 gram pecan nuts
- 50 gram puffed rice
- 50 gram puffed spelt
- 30 gram linseed
- 30 gram oat bran
- Salt to taste
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
How to cook:
Preheat your oven to 180 °C/356 °F. Take a saucepan and put it on your stove to melt 200 grams of honey. Mix the dry ingredients.
When the honey is melted take the pot off the stove and pour the honey over the dry ingredients. Stir the honey slowly through the mix.
Place a layer of the mixture on a baking tray. Season with a little bit of salt, and put it in the oven for 20 minutes. Stir the granola after 10 minutes to prevent the mixture from getting burned. Put in the oven until your granola has a lovely brown color.
Store your granola in an airtight jar and be sure to finish it within a month. The original recipe also suggests adding some dried fruits or vanilla pods. I don’t like dried fruits so I haven’t written it down in the ingredient list.
On the first try, I added a vanilla pod but I couldn’t taste it after adding fresh fruit and yogurt. On the second try, I added my homemade vanilla extract, this did give a nice flavor to the granola.
Feel free to adjust this recipe to your taste. It is an easy recipe, but oh boy it’s lovely!
I hope you enjoy this granola as much as my family does, leave me a comment below, I’m very curious about your experiences. See you next week!
Granola
Granola is marketed as a healthy breakfast choice and I wanted to try it for many years. A healthier lifestyle has been my goal for several years now, as you could read in my previous post, so I thought: Yes! This is a good and healthy choice as a breakfast. Let’s get some yoghurt, fresh fruits and top it of with some tasteful and, above all, healthy granola.
Ingredients
- 300 gram rolled oats
- 200 gram honey
- 95 gram hazelnuts
- 100 gram almonds
- 75 gram sunflower seeds
- 75 gram pumpkin seeds
- 70 gram pecan nuts
- 50 gram puffed rice
- 50 gram puffed spelt
- 30 gram linseed
- 30 gram oat bran
- Pinch of salt
Instructions
- Preheat your oven to 180 °C/356 °F.
- Put a small pot on your stove to melt the honey.
- Mix the dry ingredients.
- When the honey is melted take the pot off the stove and pour the honey over the nut and oats mix.
- Stir the honey slowly through the mix.
- Place a layer of the mixture on a baking tray.
- Season with a little bit of salt.
- Put in the oven for 10 minutes.
- Stir to prevent the mixture from getting burned.
- Put in the oven until your granola has a lovely brown color. This takes approximately another 10-15 minutes depending on your oven and the thickness of your granola layer.
Notes
- Store your granola in an air tight jar and be sure to finish it within a month.
- The original recipe also suggests to add some dried fruits or vanilla pod. I personally don’t like dried fruits so I haven’t wrote it down in the ingredient list. The first try I added the vanilla pod but I did not really taste it after adding fresh fruit and yoghurt, so I also did not include it to the recipe.
Nutrition Information
Yield 20 Serving Size 1Amount Per Serving Calories 231Total Fat 12gSaturated Fat 1gTrans Fat 0gUnsaturated Fat 10gCholesterol 0mgSodium 259mgCarbohydrates 27gFiber 5gSugar 9gProtein 6g
This nutrition information is an estimation and isn't always accurate.
