Maple granola

My standard breakfast is Greek yogurt (FAGE Total 2%) with either honey or jam on top, and a carb on the side.  The yogurt is non-negotiable, but the carb can be almost anything that isn't too super sweet: biscuits, muffins, a slice of bread, leftover French toast, leftover tortilla, leftover slice of pizza (no joke).  I tend not to combine the carb with the yogurt, but I recently saw an intriguing granola recipe in The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook for which we already had most of the ingredients and which called for mixing everything with a beaten egg white before baking to get nice big granola clusters.  Plus, in the interest of being frugal, I thought I might be able to get several breakfasts' worth of carb out of a recipe that makes 7 cups of granola.

Recipe notes

• I used sweetened shredded coconut as we did not have any unsweetened.  Illegal substitution, 5 yard penalty?  No, it seemed to come out just fine; the final product wasn't ridiculously sweet or anything, though there wasn't a very pronounced coconut taste.  Maybe next time I should get those big shavings of unsweetened flaked coconut.
• Instead of 1 cup of walnuts, I used 1/2 cup walnuts + 1/2 cup of sliced almonds, partly because that combination was less expensive at Foodland than buying walnuts only.  I got "walnut halves" instead of "shelled walnuts" in the hope that the manufacturer had packaged by volume and that I'd get more actual walnuts.  They probably packaged by weight to cover for that.
• For me, sliced almonds are too insubstantial for a recipe called "big cluster maple granola"; they get sort of lost in the shuffle.  Next time, I'd go with whole almonds: raw, if possible, since they get 45-55 minutes of baking for the granola.
• The walnuts became sort of brittle and lost their crunch after being baked for 50 minutes.  I'm not sure what I would do next time: maybe bake the granola with the almonds, then add the walnuts after baking?  Bake for less time overall?
• I omitted the toasted wheat germ because I didn't feel up to walking all around Foodland and/or Whole Foods trying to find that.
• I added the dry ingredients to the bowl first, including the salt and cinnamon (1/2 tsp. each), then added the olive oil and maple syrup and mixed everything together.  By adding the salt and cinnamon (especially the salt) before the liquids though, the grains tended to get filtered down to the bottom of the bowl, which then ended up remaining in the bowl rather than getting dumped out onto the baking sheet.  I don't know if this made a huge difference in the end, but next time, I'll add the liquids, mix together, then add the salt and cinnamon.
• The single beaten egg white did not seem to be enough for the entire mixture; there was still a lot of very crumbly granola after baking.  Maybe next time I should use 2 egg whites?  More maple syrup?  Honey?
• In a happy coincidence, I had purchased a nicely large bag of dried Montmorency cherries at Costco earlier this week before finding this recipe.  While I love me some dried cherries, I would experiment with using other dried fruit next time as the star of this recipe seems to be the maple flavor of the oats.  For me, if I'm using dried cherries in a recipe, I want that to be the predominant flavor; here they seemed to be simply part of the mixture.

Because of the maple syrup and the cinnamon, this definitely had that autumnal aroma going on when it was baking.  But since it's still over 80°F here every day, there's some cognitive dissonance going on there.

The granola went pretty well with the yogurt.  Not what I might call "ridiculously awesome", perhaps, but I'll work on that, and as it was, it was good enough for a breakfast change.

This was a very easy recipe to make, but the fantastic thing is, next time I can modify the recipe to taste.  Walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, or almonds?  Sunflower seeds?  Pignoli?  Dried cherries, dried apricots, raisins, or dried mango?  Cinnamon, plus cardamom?  The possibilities are endless!




The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (2012): pages unknown as I was using an unpaginated ebook version.
Writeup background noise: coverage of the ND-Clemson game (21-3 Clemson right now!).