Granola and Yogurt
Published June, 2012: Updated Saturday December 26, 2015
Alton Brown from the TV show Good Eats has some awesome recipes.
I love his granola recipe but it has nuts in it and my daughter has a nut allergy. I modified the recipe to not include nuts. It costs less to make now too.
We love granola so much at our house, we make a quadruple recipe every few weeks. I eat it almost exclusively for breakfast.
John's Quadrupole Batch Granola Recipe
3 cups shredded coconut
16 cups rolled oats
1 ½ cups brown sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
1 1/3 cups honey
½ teaspoon salt
- Use the same cup for honey that you used for the oil. The honey will slip right off the cup when you dump it out. Mix together the sugar, honey, oil and salt.
- Fold in the coconut and rolled oats.
- Mix well by hand in a very large container.
- Put mixture on 4 cookie sheets. It must be spread out thin enough so it can cook/dry-out in the oven.
- Stack 2 pans on a baking rack, stacking them crisscross so the granola on the bottom pan won't touch the top pan and can still get good air flow.
- Put all 4 cookie sheets in the oven and cook at 250° F oven for 35 minutes.
- Stir granola and rotate pans.
- Cook for another 35 minutes at 250° F.
- Wash out and dry off large mixing bowl used previously.
- Remove one cookie sheet at a time from the oven. Immediately remove the granola from the cookie sheet by scraping it off with a spatula into the large mixing bowl. Remove all the granola from the cookie sheets within 3 minutes or else it will harden to the cookie sheets, making cleanup difficult.
Makes enough for 20-30 bowls of granola cereal.
Granola cereal is great with milk or in an emergency, morning moos milk. I also like home-made granola with the home-made yogurt my wife makes. She uses Greek yogurt for the starter. We have found it makes a thicker, sweeter yogurt.
Homemade Greek Yogurt
½ cup Greek yogurt with active cultures.
5 cups of whole milk
No Milk on Hand? (an emergency alternative to actual milk is Morning Moos powder).1 cup of Morning moos powder.4 cups of waterStir Morning moos powder and water in a sauce pan.
- Heat milk to a boil, stirring constantly over medium heat.
- Take off heat and let the saucepan cool in an ice bath until the milk cools to 100° F.
- Stir in yogurt culture.
- Pour mixture into separate jars and let it culture at 110° F for 10-12 hours. You need a yogurt maker or a temperature settable heating pad to keep the temperature around 110° F. Any colder and it won't set up. Any hotter and you'll kill the culture.
- After 10-12 hours, yogurt should be set up.
- Screw the lids on the jars.
- Refrigerate until ready to use.
Makes 7 servings.
I highly recommend getting a yogurt maker. They maintain the correct heat and they draw less than 12 watts.
Before we had a dedicated yogurt maker, and against the better judgement of my wife, I cultured yogurt using heat from the back of a computer tower.
A real yogurt maker will only use 12 watts while a PC warm enough to make sufficient heat will use over 100 watts. But if your computer will be at 100% utilization crunching numbers for the next 12 hours, why not?
I was looking at switching to a different life insurance policy but my cholesterol and blood pressure were too high to qualify for the least expensive premium.
After 3 months of doing nothing different with my lifestyle than eating granola and yogurt for breakfast (instead of hash-browns and eggs), I lost 5 lbs and my cholesterol and blood pressure levels dropped.
I got the better premium on my life insurance policy.
Years later, I still almost exclusively eat granola and yogurt for breakfast.
Update 12/26/2015:
We have since purchased an Excalibur 3900B
9-tray food dehydrator.
In addition to drying food from our garden, it is awesome at making large quantities of yogurt. Using a single 1/2 cup start of Greek yogurt as a starter, we can culture 1 gallon of Greek yogurt.
Update 6/2017:
The instapot
is now our yogurt maker of choice.
