The Brackets!

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The michael5000 Kitchen #12: Ex-Girlfriend’s Granola Revisited

Provenance: Digging further into the recipe box back on LiveBlog Sunday, I discovered an index card with a recipe that seems to derive from, but be somewhat more exact than, the Ex-Girlfriend Granola recipe we have discussed before. Sometime between 1991 and, at the latest, 1999, I must have codified a working version of the recipe. As usual, I have no memory of this.


The Recipe:

Set oven to 300 F.

Melt in a large baking pan:

A stick of Butter
½ cup Honey
½ cup Maple Syrup
1 Tbsp Vanilla
2 Tbsp Water
Mix in:

5+ cups Oats
½ cup Wheat Germ
½ cup Sunflower Seeds
1 cup Nuts
1 Tbsp Cinnamon
1 tsp Nutmeg
1 tsp Allspice
Cook an hour and 15 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes.


The Results:

With 5 cups of Oats, the recipe is much more manageable to work with than with the vast volume of oats I tried last time. Indeed, this seems like maybe too FEW oats – it’s a pretty rich cereal in these proportions. Also, the Cinnamon-Nutmeg-Allspice combo strikes me as unnecessarily complicated, and probably just reflects my college self throwing in everything at hand. I’m thinking maybe go up to 7 cups of Oats, and eliminate the Nutmeg?

Incidentally, it doesn’t seem to matter too much for this recipe whether you use whole or rolled oats.

4 comments:

  1. Hmmm. Maybe this recipe is what broke you up? An awful lot of sweet, a lotta butter...no nuts, no coconut, no raisins or other dried fruit....I like nutmeg and cinnamon myself, but granola itself has so much flavor that it does seem superfluous. I pretoast the oats, then add the rest of the stuff, stirring in the oil and honey last before doing a shorter bake/stir cycle. (Oh, I'm back! Daughter about to depart grad school in one state, move to another. We helped her find a house near new job. Yay!)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Whole oats sound better... (I have a box that actually mixed a few grain/seed together. Off have it has flax seeds in addition the oats.)

    maybe a pumpkin or apple spice mix instead of individual spices.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Whole oats? You mean oat groats? Those have to be cooked forever, so I'm guessing you mean something else?
    I haven't made granola in years, but I do remember that I used oil instead of butter. Have you tried that? And I agree -- it's hardly worth it for only 5 cups of oats.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm sure M5000 means rolled oats in both cases--but you could use 'quick' oats (though it is not as good for you as "old fashioned" rolled oats.) Steel-cut oats can only be cooked with water (and they do take about an hour.)
    I used canola oil and honey. The nuts and oats are so good that really, spices are superfluous, and if you don't like the outcome and are stuck with 2 quarts of flavored granola..... well....

    ReplyDelete

Voting in the Infinite Art Tournament? Awesome. And, please be aware that purely anonymous votes are not counted. You don't need to log in or use your real name, but you must identify yourself in some fashion for your vote to count.