Issue #5: Crunchy, Clumpy, and Not Too Sweet: Our House Granola Recipe, Sourdough Edition
A Recipe Evolves, NFDM, What's in My Pantry, Waste-Not Mindset, Nuts for Nuts, and other Notes
How’s the cooking? I hope that you are enjoying this recipe newsletter, whether you are a new subscriber or a founding one, a home cook or a professional. I was motivated to start writing Kitchen Sense as a way to share the recipes and other cooking advice for some of the things you see posted on my instagram feed @kitchensense. I’m an avid home cook, who used my time at home during the pandemic to really go deep in the kitchen. Although I have spent my career in the professional realm of food in one way or another, I think there is something unique and wonderful about home cooking we shouldn’t lose sight of. My recipes are informed by my professional experience, but they are really intended to be used and enjoyed at home. If you like what you read and what you cook, please consider sharing this newsletter with your family and friends. If you really like it and want to support this type of direct, independent food writing, please consider a paid subscription. See you in the kitchen.
I first saw the recipe on which this granola is based in the December 2007 issue of Fine Cooking magazine. I was intrigued by the step of mixing the wet ingredients—oil, sweetener, flavorings—with nonfat dry milk powder to make a paste that you stirred into the dry ingredients. The NFDM (as nonfat dry milk is known in the “biz”) adds protein and texture to the finished granola. (It’s used in bread baking for a similar purpose.) I’m not sure what the chemistry of NFDM or granola is, for that matter, but this technique produces large clumps that crisp up and hold their shape in the finished cereal. I’ve loved it from the first time I made it. Years later, there is always some of this granola on hand.
A Recipe Evolves
Over the years I have adapted the original recipe in several ways, reducing the sweetness and fat, switching to olive oil instead of canola, changing the combination of grains, seeds, and nuts, omitting the coconut, and holding back the dried fruit until the granola is served so it all keeps fresher longer. Almost a year ago, I started baking sourdough bread regularly and I became obsessed with finding ways to use up the discard from feeding the starter instead of throwing it away. (I spend too much money on local, organic, sustainable grain to just toss all that flavor and goodness in the garbage!) I had the idea of incorporating some of it into a sourdough version of this granola. The starter acts in a similar way to the NFDM, binding the grains, nuts, and seeds with to make clumps. It also adds a faint umami flavor from the fermentation that I really like. My sourdough discard is usually whole wheat, but when I’ve made the granola with the discard from a rye starter, the taste was reminiscent of Grape-Nuts. Either way, the result is totally delicious.
Here’s the thing about granola. When I was young, granola was like yogurt and tofu: weird foods eaten solely by hippies and health-food nuts. My father was one such nut and my older brother was a hippie, so we had granola in our house with some regularity (yogurt and tofu, too). Of course, in many cultures these were totally common foods. But not in suburban North America back then. To get granola or the ingredients to make it you had to go to one of those special “health-food stores” that smelled like a combination of vitamins and sweat socks, where they sold weird off-white powders in generic plastic bags. This was not Whole Foods. It was all very clinical. I recall words like “lecithin,” “nutritional yeast,” and “riboflavin” typed (!) on generic yellow labels. (This was even before the Post-it era, if you can believe it.) The staff always looked sickly. Honestly, they scared me. I think somehow I also associated these pale, gaunt salespeople with the disgusting cod liver oil my dad used to try to sneak into my orange juice—as though you could hide it. They were in on the scheme with him. I wanted Frosted Flakes.
Now, of course, I love granola, yogurt, and tofu. In fact, all three are almost always in my house. Aisles of suburban grocery stores are now dedicated to each. (Admittedly, at the very moment I’m writing this I have also have some soy lecithin and nutritional yeast in my pantry.) There is a model, if not a moral to this story (see hummus).
Waste-Not Cooking
As much as I enjoy eating granola, I also enjoy making it. Like fried rice and frittata, granola is one of those dishes that is a perfect receptacle for so many things you might want to use up in your kitchen (see sourdough discard, above). I am giving you a recipe that I follow pretty closely because, as I said, I always have granola in our home, which means I’m always sure to have what I need to make it. When I diverge it’s usually to use up something that I want to use up that I think would be good to mix in. So, consider this recipe a framework, not a prescription. If you don’t have certain things I call for or you have other things you want to use instead, or if you prefer pine nuts to sunflower seeds, go ahead and make it your own.
Here are a few real-life examples of things I have stirred into granolas past:
Stale challah that I toasted and tore into tiny bits
Butter cookies from Denmark that I chopped up and stirred into the dry mixture
Leftover Bran Buds and All-Bran from a European trip that required supplemental bran to make everyone “regular”
Marmalade and other jams that we will never consume. I make a lot of jam myself and people love to give us jam as gifts. We have a lot of jam. And we are not marmalade lovers. So sometimes to use it up I take two or three heaping tablespoons of marmalade, chop it very finely, and add it to the granola along with the sweetener in the wet mixture, which gives a delicious hint of orange
Brazil nuts, macadamia nuts, corn nuts that people have brought back as gifts for us from trips
Crumbs from a gingerbread that became too stale to eat
Garam marsala (I was feeling creative)
Kind Bars, the appeal of which escapes me because I find them totally insipid, but that I don’t want to waste—chopped them up and stirred them in
A concentrated grape must from Israel a friend shared that I used to replace some of the honey
Korean rice syrup that I was excited to find but that I didn’t really know how to use
One note. As with muffins, all granola is presumed to be a health food. But when you read the ingredients and Nutrition Facts, most commercial granolas are just piles of sugar and fat. That’s another reason I like to make my own.
I don’t often eat granola as a cereal, that is, in a bowl with milk—though my husband Nate does. Instead, more often I use granola as a garnish or a snack, as a topping for fresh fruit and yogurt, or as a sprinkle on a breakfast tartine. I also eat it dry by the handful, like Chex mix. Nate likes his granola a little sweeter than I do, so I usually drizzle honey on his. There is a whole world of homemade granola that awaits you.
On mornings when I make us granola yogurt parfaits, that is, I layer homemade granola and homemade yogurt in a pedestaled glass, with fresh berries or other fruit, dried fruit, something sweet, such as honey or homemade jam, and sometimes cake or cookie crumbs, Nate and I joke to each other that we couldn’t afford to order this for breakfast in a restaurant, where it would cost $25 or more (service included, of course, and health care provided to the staff).
Here is my recipe. Before you make it, read through the notes at the end.
RECIPE: Mitchell’s Clumpy, Crunchy Sourdough Granola
Yields 10 cups
Pan Spray
5 cups old-fashioned rolled oats (not instant, not quick cooking, and not steel-cut), or a combination of flakes, such as oat, rye, wheat, kamut, barley, or quinoa
3/4 cup oat bran
1/2 cup wheat germ (toasted or raw) or wheat bran, or a combination
1/4 cup raw sesame seeds
1/4 cup raw pumpkin seeds
3 tablespoons flax seeds, ground or whole
1 cup raw whole almonds, coarsely chopped
1 cup raw pecan halves, coarsely chopped
1 cup sourdough discard (see note below on substitution; if you must, combine 1 cup buttermilk with 1/2 cup whole wheat or rye flour)
3/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
3/4 cup honey, pure maple syrup, silan (date syrup), sorghum molasses, jam or marmalade (chopped fine), or a combination
1/2 cup nonfat dry milk powder
1 tablespoon vanilla extract or paste
3/4 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon pure almond extract
Preheat oven to 325°F. Spray two half-sheet pans with cooking spray.
In a very large bowl, combine the oat and/or other flakes, oat bran, wheat bran, sunflower, and pumpkin seeds, flax seeds, chopped almonds, and pecans. Mix well to evenly distribute everything. In a small bowl, combine the sourdough discard, olive oil, honey, milk powder, vanilla, salt, cinnamon, and almond extract. Mix well to form a paste. (A small whisk works well.) Drizzle the paste over the oat mixture while you use a large spoon to mix it in. You are trying to coat all the dry ingredients. It will seem impossible, that the paste isn’t liquid enough to distribute, but keep mixing and you will see it works. The granola will clump and stick to the spoon; don’t worry about it. Use a spatula to scrape every last drop of the paste out of the bowl and to clean the spoon. Continue mixing the mixture to moisten all of the ingredients. At a certain point it gets easier to use your hands. Break up very large clumps so that nothing is bigger than a nickel or so, about 3/4 inch. Keep mixing until all of the dry ingredients are moistened. You’ll find the powdery brans and such on the bottom of the bowl. Be sure they are incorporated.
Divide this mixture evenly among the two prepared pans and spread and flatten it out to cover the surface of each pan. Bake for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally to break up and redistribute. You want to evenly toast the granola, so rotate the pans once or twice while its cooking. Keep a close eye to prevent burning. If the granola darkens in certain patches, break those patches up and stir them in. Reduce the heat to 300°F, and toast another 10 to 15 minutes, just until the granola is golden brown. You can remove the granola now to cool. Don’t worry that it seems soft, it will crisp up as it cools. Rather than remove the granola now, what I like to do is turn off the heat, prop the oven door open with a wooden spoon, and let the granola stay in there until the oven is cooled. This produces a deeply toasted granola, which is our house preference. You don’t want it to get too dark, or it can have a burnt taste (which we kind of like, too, tbh, but you might not.)
When cool, I divide the granola among four or five small sandwich bags and freeze all but the one we are eating at any time, which I store in an airtight container for up to a month. Frozen, the granola will last up to six months. Even more. To serve the room temperature granola, I stir in dried fruit, such as raisins, cranberries, cherries, apricots (cut up), currants, what have I.
A Few Additional Notes
Flaked grains. I used to use only oats for my granola. But then I found myself in a bakery in Stockholm, where they had the most beautiful looking rye flakes I brought home. I added some of those to may next batch, and it was yummy. I hadn’t considered there was a whole wide world of flakes until then. A subsequent walk through the aisles of Kalustyan’s revealed flattened versions of just about every grain out there. I now have jars of quinoa flakes, barley flakes, and kamut flakes, along with my flakes of oat and rye. (I use them to make multigrain sourdough breads, as well.)
Very recently I decided to get even more serious about my flakes. I had noticed a handsome device produced by the folks at Komo, who make my handsome wooden grain mill. It is called FlicFloc, and is a “flocker” or flaker, a simple but elegant hand-crank device that flattens whole grain berries or kernels into flakes. For the last batch of granola I made I rolled my own oats. (Writing that sentence makes me so happy, for some reason I can’t really explain, even though I realize it is kind of ridiculous and for many will read like a parody.) The oaty smell of the freshly flaked oats was something else, though I’m not sure you can taste the difference once the granola is made. I haven’t flaked other grains yet because I still have what to use up (see jars, above), but I will do so soon, and I’ll report back.
Sourdough starter discard, or not. As I mentioned, I only use whole wheat and/or rye in my sourdough starter, so it has a bit of a grainy texture and deep flavor that seems consistent with granola, #imho. If you don’t have any sourdough discard, you can simply omit it and up the nonfat dry milk powder to 1 cup, which is where it was in the original recipe. If you want to simulate the sourdough starter, you can combine 1 cup of buttermilk with 1/2 cup of whole wheat or whole rye flour to make a paste that you can add in place of the discard called for in the recipe. The tartness of the buttermilk does enhance the flavor somewhat (I tested this once to be sure it worked), but it seems silly to simulate something that you would otherwise be trying to use up so you don’t throw it away. I’d just omit it, myself.
Nuts for nuts (and seeds). The original recipe called for a combination of almonds and pecans in equal amounts and I think this may still be my preference. But you should use any nuts (and seeds) you like. As with other ingredients, I often have nuts around I want to use up. I’ve made this with macadamia nuts, pistachios, hazelnuts, and pine nuts. I love walnuts but I haven’t used them in granola. Something about their flavor doesn’t appeal here, I can’t say why, exactly, and besides, Nate doesn’t love them. I call for raw nuts, because they are often fresher and they will be toasted with the granola, but I’ve used roasted, both salted and unsalted, when that’s what I’ve got. One thing I will say is that if you suspect your nuts may be old and rancid, DON’T USE THEM. Taste them first to assess. Rancid nuts are a pet peeve of mine. I think many people think they hate one nut or another, especially walnuts, because they’ve never had a fresh one. I buy my nuts from a reputable source that moves a lot of them so I know they will be fresh, and I always store them in the freezer. Same with seeds. I have suggested flax, pumpkin, and sunflower, but I’ve also used sesame, white and black, and hemp.
Other things you can mess with. To reduce calories I have made this with as little as 1/4 cup of oil, but no, surprise, it is better with more. I really do use any sweetener I have, and anything I want to use up—honey, maple syrup, cane syrup, rice syrup, corn syrup, jam, etc.., and often in combination. If you like your granola on the sweeter side, you can up this to a full cup, as well.