The Yankee Kitchen: Homemade Granola

Try this great homemade granola recipe. Hi, I’m Amy Traverso, Lifestyle Editor at Yankee Magazine. Welcome to The Yankee Kitchen. Today I’m going show you how to make homemade granola. Homemade granola is a very delicious, easy, and affordable thing to make, and if you’ve bought granola in the store, you know it can get kind of pricey. For the same cost, you can get the ingredients and make huge batches of granola. This particular one is made with honey, maple syrup, cherries, almonds, and dried cranberries. It’s really delicious and let’s get started cooking. So first I’m going to make my syrup. I’m going to put my butter over medium heat, and then I also combine the maple syrup and honey. You add a little bit of vanilla and some brown sugar. So I’ve got my syrup, and I’ve got all my ingredients ready. Now I’m just going to stir them together. It takes three seconds. Here you go. You’ve got oatmeal. You’ve got some slivered almonds, some unsweetened coconut. Regular sweetened coconut is so sweet and it kind of dominates everything, so if you can get your hands on unsweetened, it’s a lot better, and a little bit of salt. A little salt is always nice in sweet things. You want that contrast. I find that the desserts I don’t like are the ones that don’t have salt in them. And now you have your syrup. So I’m just going to pour that over everything and stir it up. All right. So I’m going to spread out the granola onto a baking sheet. Now I’ve lined the baking sheet with some parchment paper. So we can just dump it out, and now you just spread it out. It doesn’t have to be perfect. I like some clumps in my granola, so I’m going to let some clumps remain. It doesn’t have to be a perfectly even layer. It’ll all cook just fine in that 325 degree oven. So here we go. It smells fantastic. I wish you could smell it, and it’s starting to turn a little bit golden and get a little bit crisp. You could also use any kind of dried fruit. You could do dried blueberries, dried apples, dried apricots, there’s a whole range, dried mangoes. You could really give it any flavor profile that you want. That’s all you have to do. Now you’re just going to put it back in the oven for another 15 minutes. So the granola has now cooled down, and it’s crisped up as it’s cooled. So when it came out, it was a little bit soft. Now it’s nice and crisp and crunchy. It’s all stuck together just a little bit, so I’m just going to loosen it. I’m just going to transfer it to this jar. I like to store it in jars. This makes a great gift if you want to wrap it up with a bow and give it to somebody. Great hostess gift. Great holiday, birthday gift. Everybody loves homemade granola. So here we go, we’re all done. This granola makes a great gift, but I recommend eating it yourself. It’s that delicious. It’ll keep for about two weeks at room temperature in a closed container before it gets soft. So you can keep it for a little while.