Crunchy Granola Recipe (Quick & Easy to Make)
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This is an easy-to-make crunchy granola recipe with oats, honey, coconut, and nuts. It has the perfect amount of sweetness and is customizable to suit vegans and those with allergies. It’s also quick to make! Stir the ingredients together, bake, and done. It takes about 45 minutes from start to finish.
Homemade granola is honestly one of the easiest and most delicious staples you can add to your pantry. Considering supermarket prices, it also saves you a lot of money, and you can customize what you want in yours to your heart’s content. That’s good news for people like me who don’t care for raisins in granola or those with food allergies. All you really need to make it is rolled oats, a bit of oil, and a bit of sweetener. Then, you roast it in the oven a few times. That’s it!
What makes homemade granola really special is all the delicious extra ingredients: dried fruit, nuts, spices, and using honey as your sweetener. It really does make this crunchy granola recipe amazing, but if you’re vegan, you could use an alternative. This recipe is simple enough for anyone with basic kitchen skills to make and once you try, you’ll be kicking yourself that you haven’t tried making granola sooner. It’s such a tasty breakfast or snack!
Granola for Allergy Sufferers
I was introduced to homemade granola many years ago while visiting my dear friend Mara in Switzerland. On the first morning, we woke up to a simple and healthy breakfast on the terrace. Imagine fresh fruit, yogurt, lattes, and a view overlooking a shining blue lake. On the table, in pride of place next to a jar of honey from my bees, was a jar of the most delicious-looking granola I’d ever seen. It was Mara’s special mix that she makes to avoid certain allergens, and my goodness – it was delicious!
It’s easy to buy granola at the supermarket so you might ask why bother making your own. First of all, there is no granola I’ve ever tasted that could compete with homemade. You also have much more control over ingredients if you make your own. You can make the recipe gluten-free by using gluten-free oats, avoid using ingredients that you don’t like, and completely eliminate any chance of having an allergic reaction. That’s why Mara makes her own.
In her twenties, she developed severe allergies to soy, hazelnuts, almonds, apples, and a few other foods. They came on suddenly, and the consequences of accidentally eating one are frightening. Making her own granola helps her avoid having to be taken to the hospital again. When faced with a serious allergy, you learn to work around it and to customize recipes to avoid certain ingredients. Mara even dries her own fruit so that she knows it’s not contaminated with apples or treated with sulfites.
Homemade Granola Recipe with Loads of Honey
We completely polished off that jar of granola during the trip. I felt terrible, but it was so good! Mara didn’t seem bothered, though, and insisted that it was easy to make. She even offered to show me how. It took about forty-five minutes, from start to finish, and at the end, her large jar was filled to the brim once more. That trip was in 2016 and I’ve continued making batches of crunchy granola since. I shake it up with using different nuts and spices and my jar is seldom empty!
Although you can use an alternative sweetener, one of the other great things about this recipe is the honey. It sweetens while sticking pieces together to create golden clusters and is so, so good! As a beekeeper, I use my own honey, but if you’re not, try to get the best honey possible for this recipe. If it’s solid honey, warm it up to make it liquid again before stirring it in.
Customize This Granola Recipe
This recipe is adapted from one Mara found in a German cookbook, but after tinkering, this crunchy granola recipe is absolutely nothing like the original. It has a lot more rolled oats, honey, and a heck of a lot more nuts. It’s amazing. Although the ingredients are given in precise measurements, feel free to change them up. Alternative ingredient suggestions are included – it’s really just up to what you like or can eat.
More Foodie Ideas to Try
- Lavender and Honey Cookie Recipe
- Infuse Honey with Herbs and Spices
- 5 Ways to Preserve Fresh Produce without Pressure Canning
Homemade Crunchy Granola Recipe
Equipment
- baking parchment paper (optional)
Ingredients
- 2.75 cups rolled oats (250 g)
- 4 TBSP sunflower oil (55 g – or melted coconut oil)
- 4 TBSP honey (80 g – or agave syrup or maple syrup)
- 3 TBSP desiccated coconut flakes (18 g)
- 1.5 tsp ground cinnamon
- Pinch fine sea salt (to taste)
- 1.5 cups nuts (215 g – hazelnuts, pecans, walnuts, almonds, pistachios, or peanuts – optional)
- 0.5 cup seeds (67 g – sunflower, flax, pumpkin, or sesame – optional)
- handful dried fruit (cranberries, raspberries, banana, raisins, freeze-dried strawberries, currants – optional)
Instructions
- Pre-heat the oven to 340°F (170°C or 150°C fan assisted).
- You can make granola with roughly chopped or whole nuts. If you prefer smaller pieces, use a kitchen knife or a mortar and pestle to reduce them to small but chunky pieces. Set aside.
- Place the rolled oats and the honey in a large mixing bowl and stir together.
- Add the oil, coconut, cinnamon, and salt and stir until all the ingredients are well mixed.
- Next, you toast the mixture. Spread it in an even layer over a sheet pan and bake for ten minutes. You can line the tray with baking paper if you wish.
- After ten minutes, take the tray out and gently stir the granola. Spread the oats out in a thin layer again and put the tray back in the oven for another ten minutes.
- Take the tray out of the oven, mix and re-spread again, then sprinkle the nuts over the top. Bake in the oven for another ten minutes.
- Take the granola out when the nuts and oats are golden. There's a fine line between golden and starting to darken, so it might help to sit and watch them for the last few minutes.
- Cool the granola for one to two hours before adding the optional dried fruit. To avoid allergies or sulfites you can make dried fruit yourself using a food dehydrator.
- Keep your homemade granola stored in an airtight container and use it within three months. The typical serving size is about ¼ to ½ a cup, which adds the perfect amount of crunch to yogurt and snacks.
Absolutely delicious! I added a tbls of wheat germ and a teaspoon of vanilla 😋
That does sound delicious! I’m glad that you enjoyed making this crunchy granola recipe :)
This granola is lovely. So nice and crunchy with that little touch of sweetness. Marsha from Canada
Hmm, mine recipe is going to be ‘interesting’ …. I thought I was adding dried bananas – but they were dried bread beans!!!!!! It looks good though ….
Great article. Is there a dehydrator that you would recommend? It looked like Mara had a dehydrator in the background of some of her pictures but I couldn’t see what brand it was. Thanks!
Yes, she was dehydrating banana slices and raspberries in it. As for models, I think mine is so old now (10 years) that it’s no longer available. Mara’s is available in Europe though and is an Ambiano model. I’d advise just heading to Amazon here https://amzn.to/30dJILX and looking for one that suits your price point and has good ratings.