A few years ago, I started a tradition I hope to maintain for many years: gifting homemade granola for Christmas. Inspiration came from one of my favourite YouTubers, Diegodoal, and his video on 5 homemade edible gifts.
Every year, I tweak the recipe a bit and also try to improve the packaging to elevate the gift and make it feel like a premium granola you could buy in a store. On the packaging side, there’s still room for improvement, but with the recipe, I think I’ve reached a pretty solid spot.
My “secret sauce” consists mainly of two ingredients: miso paste and brown butter. The combination creates a flavour bomb, delivering a complex, nutty, umami, and subtly salty taste that makes the granola addictive.
If your mouth is already watering, let me finish inspiring you with the full recipe:
Ingredients for 10 portions
- 3 tablespoons of Butter (60 g)
- 2 tablespoons of olive oil
- 1 tablespoon of Miso paste (20g)
- ¼ glass of honey (75 g)
- 2 glasses of oats (220 g)
- 330 g of dried nuts (I used pecan nuts, pistachio, cashew, almonds, and pine nuts. But feel free to choose your favorite ones)
- [optional] 1 tablespoon of chai spices (Freshly ground whole spices – including black cardamom, green cardamom, cinnamon, cloves, coriander seeds, black pepper, star anise, and ground ginger).
Step by Step
- Preheat the oven to 150°C with the top and bottom heat on.
- Heat the butter in a saucepan over medium heat until it turns a light golden colour and smells toasted, being careful not to burn it.
- In a large bowl, combine the wet ingredients: the brown butter we just prepared, honey, miso, and olive oil. Mix until you have a paste with a caramel-like texture.
- Optional: If you want to add an extra twist to your granola and want to try the “Chai” version, add the chai spices to this mix. This was this year’s addition to the recipe, and it was a hit.
- Add 2 cups of oats and 350 g of chopped nuts. Mix very well until everything is coated.
- On a baking tray lined with parchment paper, spread the mixture to form a compact block, about 0.5–1 cm thick.
- Note: Don’t crumble it. Compact it to get those big, crunchy chunks later on.
- Bake for 20–25 minutes with the fan on, until the edges are lightly golden, being careful not to burn the granola.
- Let it cool completely before breaking it apart. It’s important not to touch it while hot so it sets and becomes crispy.
- Once cool, break the granola into pieces of your preferred size (1–2 cm) and store it in an airtight container.
This year, I prepared 2kg in total and packaged it in 100 g hermetic bags, so I was able to gift almost 20 “Miso Granolas” (I kept a few for myself, haha). It takes around an hour to prepare a full batch and package it, and everyone I’ve gifted it to has loved it. The recipe is also very flexible—you can add pretty much anything, from chocolate chips to dried fruits or different seeds. Plus, it’s easy to keep gluten-free, which is a bonus for me.
Here are some pics I took during the process:
P.s. Here’s the prompt I used to create the stickers’ logo.