Homemade Granola Recipe from The China Study Cookbook

Directions

• Preparation
• Put oats, cinnamon, nutmeg, coconut, nuts, and raisins in a large bowl and mix thoroughly. Set aside.

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• Put water, vanilla, sugar and maple syrup into a pan and cook on low heat until the sugar has dissolved —- takes about 2 minutes.

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• After the sugar is dissolved, drizzle all of the liquid over your bowl of dry ingredients. I poured it in all at once, but I think you’ll get better coverage if you pour some in and then mix it up a bit. Then pour and mix some more–the liquid soaks into the oats quite quickly!

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• Cooking in Conventional Oven
• Cover a baking sheet with parchment paper and spread out a thin layer of your mixture. Pro Tip! This recipe makes enough for several batches–and each batch takes an hour in the oven! If you have a small oven, like me, you could spend 3 to 4 hours baking your homemade batches of granola! To speed things up, cover your slotted oven rack with parchment paper and bake two layers of granola at a time! If the parchment paper doesn’t feel strong enough to hold your homemade granola mixture, cover your baking rack with tin foil first.

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• Bake at 300 degrees for about an hour, checking on the granola mixture every 15 minutes. Remove from your oven when the oats are dry and crispy, but before turning a dark color. Have a look at the two cooked batches of homemade granola in the picture below (right side). The batch on the baking tray is perfect. The batch in the white dish was cooked a little too long. I mixed all batches together and it was fine. Still, though, don’t forget to keep peeking into the oven, especially on your first batch. You want dry and crunchy with just a tiny bit of color change — not dry and crunchy with a dark color!

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• Cooking in an Air Fryer
• While one batch of homemade granola took an hour in my conventional oven, one batch of the same granola mixture took just 12 to 15 minutes in my air fryer, which saved me a ton of time! Other than that, the process is the same. Spread out a thin layer of mix on the air fryer tray. Then cook for 12 to 15 minutes at 300 degrees, checking your mix every 5 minutes or so. Remove when dry and crunchy…before it starts turning dark. Pro Tip! Make sure the bottom of your air fryer is clean because lots of little oats fall through the basket, at least on my unit. If it’s clean, though, no worries…just pour them in with the rest of the batch.

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• After cooking in your conventional oven or air fryer, lay out the granola on a flat surface and let cool. Now is also a good time to make fun art projects if you’re so inclined 🙂

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• Store homemade granola in air tight containers. Also, here is a quick calorie breakdown in case you’re interested how much of this homemade granola you should be eating every day!.

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• Like I mentioned at the top of this page, this homemade granola recipe (or any other granola recipe) is not exactly low calorie, so eat it strategically. It’s great for breakfast as long as most of the meal is fresh fruit. It’s also great sprinkled on things like yogurt. But if you’re watching your calories I wouldn’t go eating a whole jar of it for a snack! You can see full nutrition information breakdown for this homemade granola recipe below.

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