Granola Living

I read an article about saving money by making your own grocery staples a few weeks ago. It evaluated the cost-saving, efficiency, and taste of making bagels, jam, yogurt, crackers, granola, and cream cheese at home.

We'd previously experimented with this idea when we got Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything" cookbook several years ago. We learned that we're happier making our own pasta sauce than buying - it's amazingly simple and we can customize the spices. (I find most store bought pasta sauces too sweet). We also learned that store bought pancake mix is much better than any concoction we could make. Our homemade pancake mix tended towards heavy, frisbee-like texture and taste. We never did figure out just what was different.

This time, I was intrigued by the prospect of homemade granola and yogurt. Lee is a big fan. Me, not so much. And I even spent several weeks eating it for breakfast in an effort to acquire a taste for it. I'm also intrigued by the bagels, but I haven't had a chance to try that yet.

So last weekend, I gave granola and yogurt manufacturing a try. Yogurt requires milk and a starter yogurt culture with live bacteria in it. Granola needs rolled oats, maple syrup, brown sugar, vegetable oil and other stuff you want in it, which in our case ended up being dried cranberries and slivered almonds. I used Alton Brown's recipe for the granola. For the yogurt, I referenced a recent New York Times article for what sounded like relatively straightforward instructions.

The granola was a clear win. It took a few minutes to mix the ingredients together, and an hour and 15 minutes to bake in the oven. The result was a crunchy, tasty granola that Lee was very happy with. I've even willingly had it for breakfast twice this week. Next time, I'll put a little less brown sugar and add another kind of nut, perhaps cashew, to the mix.

The yogurt experiment did not live up to expectation. It was relatively simple, but I got paranoid over the directive of sterile instruments about halfway through the process. I felt a little rushed with the waiting times (waiting for the milk to heat to the right temperature, then waiting for it to cool) because we wanted to start a fish dinner about the same time and I held dinner off with the idea that preparing both at the same time would impart a fishy taste to the yogurt. By the next morning, I ended up with yogurt-tasting milk. I think there were some miniscule globules at the bottom of the jar that may have actually been the right consistency of yogurt.

My internet research tells me that maybe the milk I used came from cows fed antibiotics that would kill the yogurt producing bacteria. Perhaps the yogurt starter I used didn't actually have the advertised live cultures in it. But the milk did indeed taste yogurty, so I'm not sure about that hypothesis. I might give this another try with different yogurt and milk brands.

My day with kitchen experimentation didn't end up a complete disaster. We've gone through half the batch of granola already and I'm looking forward to the next batch. I'm not sure when I'm trying the yogurt again. Maybe I'll switch to trying bagels next and come back to that.