Grain Free Granola

So I just recently purchased a dehydrator! It was prompted by a visit to a raw restaurant in Atlanta called Lovin' It Live. We were both so in love with the food (which is saying a LOT for my husband!) that we thought we needed to purchase a dehydrator to be able to make similar things at home. As it turns out we don't think they dehydrated anything at Lovin' It Live, but still I'm glad we purchased this. We used our Bed Bath & Beyond coupon for the 20% off, but I found out you can get this one- which is comparable to ours-- on Amazon.

All that to say that one of my newbie dehydrator experiments has been trying to get a good grain-free, low sugar granola! Well, I feel as though I have gotten a pretty good Grain-free Granola 1.0 version going so I am going to post it. But I will definitely be playing around with this one, and possibly creating a version with coconut sugar soon.

Grain-free Granola Version 1.0

Ingredients

- 1 apple, banana, pear, or 1/3 cup unsweetened applesauce

- 1 Tbsp cinnamon

- 1 Tbsp vanilla powder or extract

- 1/4 tsp sea salt

- 1 cup nuts: slivered almonds, Brazil nuts, hazel nuts, and cashews work well

- 1/4 cup pumpkin or sunflower seeds

- 2 Tbsp chia seed meal (ground up in a coffee grinder or high powered blender, or bought from a whole food market or iherb.com)

- optional: coconut flakes, buckwheat groats (pseudocereal/grain, not a true grain- these give an extra crunch to the granola), raisins, other dried fruit- the possibilities are endless! What you see pictured has buckwheat groats in it but no coconut.

Method

- First, puree the banana, apple or pear that you are using with the cinnamon, vanilla powder or extract, and sea salt

- Next, in a food processor, pulse the nuts, seeds, chia seed meal, and coconut/ buckwheat groats/ other add ins (if using) until nuts and seed pieces are pea-sized (or about the size you picture granola pieces being- I like to make them small so that they look kind of like oats)

- Mix the fruit mixture with the nut mixture in a bowl. The mixture should resemble a crumble topping (moist, but like what would go on top of an apple crisp before it’s baked).

- Sprinkle onto dehydrator trays (I use parchment paper to keep the smaller pieces from falling through the holes in the dehydrator trays) and dehydrate at 110°-115°, overnight or until crispy like granola.*

I mostly use the above recipe for a formula now. Playing around with ingredients, but making sure to have about the same ratio of nuts/seeds to fruit/ other liquid. The beauty of granola is it is pretty hard to mess up. As long as you have some good, tasty ingredients, some chia seed meal and some liquid, this formula will pretty much make a nice crunchy granola for you :)

*NOTE: If you do not have a dehydrator, you may be able to make this in your oven set at it's lowest setting (probably around 135-150). The drying out time will probably not take overnight as well. If you try this- let me know how it goes!