Homemade Granola

Did you notice that the header of my blog says “recipes” and I never shared any yet?
Well, I thought it was about time I start… So, I decided then to take photos of my last batch of homemade granola!

Oats for Breakfast

I almost always eat oats for breakfast, because they’re loaded with important vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants. Besides having a lot of health benefits, oats are filling and versatile.

My “oat recipe of choice” depends largely on the time of the year. In the cold months I usually eat warm porridge (most of the time with banana, raisins, and cinnamon) or oat muffins. In the hotter months, I prefer overnight oats with fruits or a large bowl of fruit with granola. Sometimes even with a splash of oat milk 🙂

THE RECIPE

I vary this recipe a lot depending on what I have in my pantry, and I will tell you more of this as I write about the ingredients.

Ingredients

• 2 ½ cups of rolled oats.
• 1 cup of nuts. You can use pecans, common nuts, almonds, cashews, pine nuts, hazelnuts, macadamias, pistachios… Today I used a mix of common nuts, pecans and almonds.
• ½ cup of sunflower seeds. It is also delicious with pumpkin seeds or a mixture of both. But since I use pumpkin seeds for my seed crackers for salty snacks, I only put sunflower seeds in here 🙂
• ¾ to 1 cup of dried fuits. They can be raisins, dates, figs, dried mangoes, dried cranberries, banana chips, prunes … Whatever you like. Chop them a bit if they’re big dried fuits, like figs or mango strips. I used ½ cup of cranberries and ½ cup of raisins because it was what I had on hand.
• 10 pitted dates. You will process them with tahini and a little water to form a cream, so if they are not soft you should soak them before using them. Soak them for a couple of hours in warm water (or let them soak overnight, in a lidded jar, in the fridge).
• 3 tablespoons of tahini

Directions

1. Preheat the oven at 200°C (390°F). Lay a baking tray with cooking paper and set aside.
2. Chop roughly the nuts and reserve. Chop your dried fruits if needed and reserve in another bowl.
3. Process together the soft pitted dates, tahini and 2 tablespoons of water*. You should obtain a cream of mayonnaise-like consistency.  * If you soaked the dates, use the soaking water.
4. In a large bowl, mix together the oats, chopped nuts and sunflower seeds.
5. Toss the date/tahini cream into the bowl and mix until all dried ingredients are fully coated.
6. Spread the mixture evenly over the sheeted tray by smashing it gently with the back of a spoon.Try not to leave the mixture too loose in the borders (smash it with the spoon towards the center) or it will burn quickly in the oven.
7. Bake approx. 15 minutes at 200°C (390°F) or until the surfaces gets golden.
8. Let it cool until you can touch it and crumble it into big chunks.
9. Once it has cooled completely, transfer all of it into a bowl and add the dried fruits you reserved. Mix until well combined.
10. Store the granola in a glass container and keep it in a cool dry place.
11. Enjoy!! 😋

NOTES

• Since this granola has not added sugar, you can even use it to add some cruch (and more nutrients!) to a salad.
• If you prefer your granola more sweet, you can add 1 or 2 tablespoons of maple syrup to the blender when you make the date/tahini cream.