I’ve been making raw granola this week and wanted to share the procedure with you. In my effort to provide more and more raw and whole foods for my family, I hoped to replace their regular sugary cereals with a more nutritious combination of raw seeds, nuts, fruit and grains.
I started with 4 cups of organic, steel cut oats. I soaked the oats in 2 cups of kefir to break down the phytic acid and make the nutrients more available to our bodies.
I soaked the oats for 24 hours. You could use yogurt or even water and a little apple cider vinegar instead of kefir. I would probably use some kombucha too and I might do that next time.
After the oats are soaked I added all the other ingredients. I used raw pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, organic golden raisins, organic dried cherries sweetened with apple juice and organic dried cranberries sweetened with juice. It’s not too sweet so at this point, taste it, and add a little bit of honey to sweeten it as desired.
Once everything was mixed well, I placed big spoonfuls of it on parchment paper and dried it in my Excaliber dehydrator at a temperature of 108* til it was dry and crisp. I crumbled it up and stored it in jars. I guess I should add that it is delicious! The whole family enjoys it, even Mr Picky. Its good with milk as a cereal, as a topping for yogurt and ice cream and as a snack.
Hello and welcome! I'm Sylvia Britton, and I've been online since 1996 offering encouragement and help in the spirit of Titus 2 and Proverbs 31 at Christian Homekeeper. CHK is the original Homekeeping site on the internet
I have ordered stuff to make kefir and am going to try this mix!
Tell me please, about how it stores so I know whether to make a smaller batch or not. I have jars and a vacuum lid sealer, what about just jarring it? Should it be used w/ in the year? or more like 6 months?
I kept it in glass jars with lids. It never lasts 6 months so I don’t know! We can go through a batch in about 1 week, but there are 5 of us at home right now. You could freeze it too.
Oops! Guess I should have read the previous comments!
Sylvia, you mention that you dried the granola in a dehydrator. Could you dry it in an oven at a low temperature instead?
Hi Sylvia,
This sounds like a great recipe. I always need a little something before going to bed and this sounds like it would hit the spot.
One question. Can I use regular rolled oats just as well or would you recommend I get the steel cut oats? Also, do you rinse the oatmeal after soaking it to wash away the enzyme inhibitors?
Hi Marly,
I think you can use regular old fashioned oats in this.
You don’t need to wash the oats because the kefir acts on them to change them at the molecular lever. It simply breaks them down and makes them easier to digest and makes the nutrients more available to your body.
Thanks for stopping by!
Hi I just found your blog. Very nice. I was wondering on the oats
do you put them in the frig to soak with the yogurt. I do not have
a dehydrater can I use the oven on a low temp?
Thanks. Susan
Hi Susan,
I left the oats out at room temperature. If you can control the temperature of your oven, you can dry out the granola in it. The idea is to keep the temperature lower than 118* if you possibly can.
Thanks for coming by!
That looks yummy, I have a raw granola recipe as well which I want to try but am waiting for my nut order.
I see you are using parchment paper. Do you find it holds well in the deydrator? I recently purchased an excalibur with one of those sheets for cracker making, etc. Always looking for ways to save money. Will the parchment paper work just as well?
blessings
carmen
The parchment paper worked well. IN fact I saved it to use again. I don’t know about the cracker sheets, I have the plastic sheets with the holes in them that came with the Excalibur and of course the granola would have seeped through those.
Oh, yummy! Thank you for sharing this!
I hope you will try it Yolanda!