A while ago I stumbled across this recipe, bookmarked it, and forgot about it. For quite a while. Not until last month when I was cleaning out my bookmark folder did I rediscover it, and resolved to make it myself.
See, my husband loves granola. I like it too, but I’m real picky about it. The cheap granola around here (Roger’s) is just all wrong . . . texture-wise especially. It IS cheap ($3/kg or something like that) but I just can’t get down with granola that hurts my teeth. So James started making granola, and the only recipe he had was for peanut butter granola.
Just like granola, my husband loves peanut butter. And in the same way I like it too, but I’m real picky about it. Basically if it doesn’t say “refrigerate after opening” on the jar, I’m not buying it. And, I only like it in its natural state - i.e. spread on bread or something like that, not as an ingredient in something else. So I don’t like peanut butter cookies or chocolate or ice cream, or granola. You can see why I needed a new granola recipe.
This one is hands down, the best ever. The perfect combination of sweet, nutty, and crunchy. We could really only see one drawback - it’s expensive. All those nuts don’t come cheap you know. So we decided to do a cost analysis, which I did yesterday since I had to buy almost all the ingredients for it. While it was in the oven I sat down with the receipts and a calculator.
As written, and with the products that we are most likely to use, one batch of it costs just over $23. It makes 28 servings, so $0.83 per serving. If we’re too lazy to go get the nuts at the bulk store and get the little packages at the closer grocery store it comes out to more. On the other hand, if we make a few adjustments (use dried cranberries, which we prefer anyway, instead of the stupidly expensive pistachios, and get the 3kg pail of honey instead of the 1kg jar) that knocks it down to $19.64 per batch, or $0.70 per serving. I could probably save a lot more money by using cheap crappy honey instead of the amazingly good local honey, but then I could also save a lot MORE money by just buying the cheap crappy Rogers granola, now couldn’t I? Besides, did you know that local honey mitigates seasonal allergy symptoms?
The other object of my granola geekery was to find out how our granola compares, price-wise, to the “gourmet granola” in the store. There’s a dude at the farmer’s market who sells his fancy granola for about $11/kg (if you buy the biggest bag), so I took that as the benchmark. However I failed in one key respect: I don’t have a scale. Just eyeballing it though, this recipe appears to produce a bit more than twice the volume of the 750g bag, so I’m estimating it at 1.75 kg and thus $11.22/kg.
I’m pretty okay with that, since my granola is better than his anyway.
Post a Comment