Homemade Granola

This homemade granola recipe is so versatile and delicious, it’s the only one you’ll ever need! Seriously! It can be made with ingredients you probably have sitting in your pantry right now. That means you know exactly what goes into it! The recipe also makes lot, which means it’s a lot more friendly on your wallet too. Frugal recipe with no guesswork on ingredients? Gigantic plus in my book!

I started making homemade granola a few yeares ago, based on a very basic recipe I found on ChowHound. It was pretty good, but it didn’t make enough to get us through {seriously, we go through a TON of this stuff and really fast too!}.

So I started tweaking and playing around with the ratios in order to still get that sweet and crunchy oat flavor, and not compromise on fruit and nuts.

What I’ve come up with is a basic recipe that uses ingredients you probably already have in your pantry, and when all is said and done it makes about 11 cups of homemade granola! It’s perfect for breakfast {I eat it with milk as a cereal}, as a snack {Monkey nabs some up when he comes home from school}, or as a topping to your yogurt and a drizzle of honey on top {Hubs’s favorite way to eat it!}! Either way, every time I make this granola, it doesn’t last long at all.

It does have optional ingredients. These are things that we add to our granola, and it’s never the same. We like to mix it up, and you can do the same!

Before I get to the recipe though, let me just state that if you’re looking for a granola bar recipe, this won’t hold together enough for that. It will be clumpy, depending on how often you stir it during its cooling time, but it will not hold together in a bar form at all.

And let’s be honest. Do those Quaker granola bars hold together all that well as we’re eating them out of the wrapper? I can never seem to keep them in a bar form while I’m eating one.

Now that that’s out of the way, on to the recipe!

Ingredients:

4 ½ cups old fashioned rolled oats {not the quick cooking kind}
4 ½ tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon salt
½ cup honey
1/3 cup coconut oil **
1 teaspoon vanilla

Optional Ingredients:

¼ cup each of Chia seeds, flax seeds, hemp seeds and sunflower seeds, or other seed of your choice
½ cup coconut flakes
1 ½ cups dried fruit. Don’t be afraid to use a mixture! Our personal favorites are strawberries, cranberries and blueberries
1 ½ cups nuts. Again, use a variety! We love walnuts and sliced almonds.

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°F. Grease a cookie sheet with cooking spray. {I use a 11×17 pan for our granola.}
In a large bowl, combine the oats, brown sugar, cinnamon, and salt.
In a small bowl, combine honey, coconut oil and vanilla. Add the honey mixture to the oat mixture. Evenly spread out on baking sheet.
Bake for 15 minutes. Stir. Bake for an additional 5-10 minutes until the oats are a golden color, but not burnt.
Remove from oven, stir and let sit for 10-15 minutes. Add in seeds, coconut flakes, dried fruit, and nuts. Let sit until cool.

**Notes:
~ You could substitute butter or vegetable oil for this. I have used both, and find that butter tends to leave the granola a bit greasy while the vegetable oil makes the granola less clumpy.
~ If you want your granola to have more clusters, try not to over-stir as it cools.