Vegan Coconut Granola

I love granolas – I eat them for breakfast, pudding or even munch on them for an afternoon snack. This Vegan Coconut Granola is everything I crave!

After my GERD/GORD and stomach ulcer diagnosis, I needed to be more careful about my sugar and processed food intake. Therefore, I was advised by a health professional to stop buying any store-bought cereals, granola or any breakfast-marketed product for that matter. I learnt that store-bought granola is usually not as healthy as we think, or as brands make it look like. It not only has heavily added refined sugar and processed ingredients that I need to avoid but they’re also fairly expensive!
So, to balance out my diet and to give my wallet a rest, I started making my own.

I wanted something that I could eat in my breakfast yoghurt bowl, with wholegrain ingredients and the nutrition I needed. But I’m not ready to sacrifice taste nor spend hours cooking myself a snack, so I tried to come up with a quick and easy recipe that tastes delicious and lasts for weeks!

I gathered some of my favourite ingredients – nuts, dates, fruits and such – and started experimenting. Though to be fair, it was more of a “randomly mixing things together” rather than a conscious process..but eh it worked! and voilá! Couldn’t be happier with the results and I hope after you try my Vegan Coconut Granola, it becomes one of your favourites too!

Vegan Coconut Granola

Bean

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Prep Time 10

Cook Time 15

Cooling Time 15

Total Time 45

Course Breakfast, Dessert, Snack

Cuisine American, Italian, Mediterranean

Servings 12 servings

Equipment

1 Oven
1 Food processor or blender
1 Oven tray
1 sheet Non-stick baking paper

Ingredients

100 gr Peanuts
50 gr Dried cocunut flakes or chunks
100 gr Dates
2 tbsp Maple Syrup or Molasse Make sure to check the ingredients when buying – look for 100% maple or 100% molasse with a vegan stamp, no extra additives!

Instructions

Preheat the oven on a static setting to 200°C – if you don't have the static settings you can use the fan to 180°C.
Add the peanuts into your food processor or blender and blend for a couple of seconds until your peanuts are of a coarse texture. Transfer the peanuts into a large saucepan.
Mix the coconut pieces and the dates, transfer into your blender and roughly blend for a minute until the ingredients all stick together leaving a rough chunky mixture. Add this mixture into the saucepan.
Depending on how much the dates have stuck to the other ingredients you should add between 1 to 3 tablespoons of your chosen syrup to coat the granola – the more syrup, the sticker your granola will be! Heat the saucepan and stir the syrup into the mix on a medium heat until all the ingredients appear fully coated with the syrup.
Cover the oven tray with baking paper and transfer the mixture from the saucepan to the oven tray. Spread evenly with a spatula making sure to have one thick layer of sticky granola. The mixture will be very chunky so no worries if there are big gaps in between chunks – spoiler -we're gonna break it up at the very end anyways! Toast the granola on the middle shelf of the oven for 15 minutes. Make sure to keep an eye on your granola to avoid burning. Every oven is slightly different so these timings and temperatures might need a bit of adjustment to suit your equipment.
Once the 15 minutes are up, take the granola out and check that everything is evenly toasted and looks slightly hardened. Leave on a sheltered spot on your kitchen counter until fully cooled – this will take around 15 to 20 minutes.
Once fully cooled down, break your granola layer apart into small rough chunks and store it an air-tight container. Enjoy!