Baker Without Borders

I make homemade granola at least once a week, and was curious about the origins of this classic (yet endlessly adaptable) American breakfast cereal.

After doing some digging on Wikipedia and The Nibble, a website that documents the history of nearly a thousand popular foods, I learned that granola was invented in 1863 at a health spa in upstate New York.

The spa’s owner, a doctor named Caleb Jackson, produced the world’s first baked cereal by toasting and crumbling graham flour (as in, the coarsely ground whole wheat flour used to make graham crackers.) He named his creation “granula.”

Not long after, the founder of Kellogg Company, who also ran a health spa, where he invented corn flakes, thought up a similar concept and rebranded it “granola” to avoid a lawsuit.

By the 1960s, according to the Food Historian blog, granola’s ingredient list shifted to include honey, seeds, nuts, and oats, and became popular with the hippie crowd. So much so that the term “crunchy” – as in crunchy granola – became synonymous with health-conscious nature lovers.

Granola has since gone mainstream, proliferating on grocery store shelves. In the U.S., grocery shoppers spend $2 billion annually on granola products, many of which are loaded with refined sugar.

I serve this delightfully crisp, relatively low-sugar and low-fat variation for breakfast, sometimes multiple days in a row, with yogurt or oat milk and berries.

Homemade granola may seem like a lot of work, but this recipe, adapted from Cookie & Kate, is easy to throw together on a weeknight. After my kids go to bed, I measure oats, pecans, walnuts, sliced almonds, and dried cherries directly into a parchment-lined baking pan.

Then I gently stir in avocado oil, maple syrup, salt, and cinnamon with a wooden spatula, and bake.

With their bursts of tangy sweetness, the dried cherries (I got these from Trader Joes, with no added sugar) are the star ingredient.