Pumpkin Spice Granola

This AIP allergy friendly pumpkin spice granola from http://meatified.com has all the flavors of Fall and is grain, nut & seed free! Eat it with coconut milk or just by the handful.

I have, no joke, made this pumpkin spice granola at least ten times to get it right.

As a food blogger, I follow way too many food blogs. Not just their blogs, but their social media accounts, too. And so often it seems like I’ll see someone say something along the lines of: “hey, look at this amazing ___ I threw together tonight! It’s so great, it’ll be up on the blog tomorrow!!”.

And I’m like: if that were me, you’d be lucky to see it next week. Honestly, if I think I’m going to get a recipe done and photographed and up here by the weekend, but in reality I hit publish on the following Thursday: I give myself an internal high five and congratulate myself for not being a complete food-blogger-fuck-up.

So usually, I’m slower than the average food blogger, but this pumpkin spice granola recipe decided to elude me for goddamn weeks. (Which is always the way when your first thought when planning a recipe in advance is, “this will be easy!”). The first batch was too wet and soggy, the second was a tasteless mess and don’t even get me started on the blistered apocalypse of batch numero trois.

To add insult to injury, ALL of those batches looked a-ok at the beginning. So I kept taunting you all with social media posts where I thought the current batch was the one…. buuuut then it turned out, it wasn’t. It was the reality TV couple of grain free granola: it looked good at first, but then disintegrated into unhappiness and ineptitude before it was all over.

This AIP allergy friendly pumpkin spice granola from http://meatified.com has all the flavors of Fall and is grain, nut & seed free! Eat it with coconut milk or just by the handful.

After a while, I just had to throw in the towel, take a break and then start over. And cuss a little. Well, ok, fairly repeatedly. BUT! In the end, I made this pumpkin spice granola work! Once I nailed the correct ratio of pumpkin puree to dry ingredients (much less than you think!) and figured out the amount of maple syrup factored into the way it cooked, I was finally a happy, if somewhat cuss-addled camper.

Because I was determined that this would actually be a true pumpkin granola, not just pumpkin spiced granola. And, honestly, the fact that I finally got this recipe up on the blog this side of Christmas is a personal victory, ha!

This AIP allergy friendly pumpkin spice granola from http://meatified.com has all the flavors of Fall and is grain, nut & seed free! Eat it with coconut milk or just by the handful.

Because of the blend of pumpkin, cinnamon, ginger, mace and cloves going down, this pumpkin spice granola smells like you’ve got an actual loaf of pumpkin bread in the oven as it cooks. It’s like Fall in edible form! I like to add a few golden raisins once its cooled for a pop of extra sweetness and contrast, but you could also try mixing in crispy apple chips or some extra toasted coconut chips, too. (I’m obsessed with these caramel sea salt coconut chips lately!)

This AIP allergy friendly pumpkin spice granola from http://meatified.com has all the flavors of Fall and is grain, nut & seed free! Eat it with coconut milk or just by the handful.

PSSST! If you’re not feeling the pumpkin, check out my grain, nut and seed free Sweet & Salted Granola AIP here.

Looking for more AIP friendly breakfast recipes? Check out 85 Amazing AIP Breakfasts!

This recipe was shared in the Paleo AIP Recipe Roundtable.

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Pumpkin Spice Granola

  • Author: Rachael Bryant / Meatified
  • Cook Time: 1 hour 20 mins
  • Total Time: 1 hour 20 mins
  • Yield: 1 1/3 lb / 590 g 1x

Ingredients

Scale

Instructions

  1. SHRED: Preheat the oven to 325 F / 160 C with the rack in the center position. Peel and shred your white sweet potato using the coarse side of a box grater, then add the shreds to a mixing bowl. Add the plantain chips / strips to the bowl and use your knuckles to gently crush them: you want the plantain chips / strips to be broken down enough to work through the mixture but not be crushed to smithereens! The same kind of size as cornflakes is about what you’re aiming for. Add the coconut flakes to the mixing bowl, then use the coarse side of a box grater to shred the apple. Don’t worry about peeling, just grate around the core. Once you’ve grated out the apple, transfer it to a fine mesh sieve and, over the sink, press down on the shredded apple firmly to drain out as much of the juice as possible. Add the shredded apple to the mixing bowl, too.
  2. MIX: Add the pumpkin, maple syrup, cinnamon, ginger, mace and cloves to the bowl. Stir through with a spatula until everything is evenly distributed through the granola mixture. Line a baking tray with a silicone baking sheet or parchment paper, then pour the granola mixture into the middle of the tray. Use a spatula to spread the granola mixture across the baking sheet in an even layer, pressing down on it firmly. Sprinkle with sea salt, to taste.
  3. BAKE: Pop the baking sheet into the oven and cook for 30 minutes. Remove the tray from the oven and use a spatula to gently break the granola mixture into large chunks. Spread the granola mixture back out evenly across the baking tray and return to the oven. Bake for another 40 minutes, stirring every 10 minutes or so to break up the clusters and prevent burning at the edges.
  4. COOL: Remove from the oven and allow to cool on the tray to further crisp up, then add the raisins and stir them through before transferring the granola to an airtight container. Will keep for at least a week.

Notes

You want to use the wide, flat unsweetened coconut flakes that are about an inch long here. They’re sometimes labelled as “coconut chips”. You don’t want the finely shredded coconut, as that will burn way too soon instead of toasting.

 

This AIP allergy friendly pumpkin spice granola from http://meatified.com has all the flavors of Fall and is grain, nut & seed free! Eat it with coconut milk or just by the handful.

6 comments

  1. This looks yummy! I wanted to let you know that you mention oil in step 2 but I don’t see it listed in the ingredients.

    1. Thanks for the catch! I was meant to remove that and I’ve fixed it now 🙂 I tried adding oil in an earlier batch, but it really wasn’t needed in the end, so I ditched it from the final recipe because it made the granola brown a little too much!

  2. This sounds great, I can’t wait to make it! Question though: what if the only coconut flakes I can find are toasted ones? Is this going to be a problem? 😬

    1. So sorry I missed this earlier! I can’t say for sure, since I haven’t tested this recipe with pre toasted flakes, but since the plain dried variety end up pretty golden by the end of the cooking time, I suspect using pre toasted flakes may end up with very toasted or possibly burnt bits. I’m not sure where you’re located, but you can usually find the dried / un toasted flakes in the baking aisle, depending on which grocery stores are available to you. You can also purchase them on Amazon, but they may be more expensive there than in stores.

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