Welcome to another edition
of Dr. Greger in the Kitchen. "Dr. Greger in the Kitchen:
Groatnola" Today, we're going to
be making “groatnola,” which arose out
of my frustration with finding a healthy
breakfast cereal. This is an SOS-free recipe
with no added salt, oil, or sugar, which is hard to find
in the grocery store. There’s two last
time I checked; one’s called
Uncle Sam's cereal, which is toasted, flattened wheat berries
and flaxseeds. You get a little box;
it’s expensive. And then, there's some
brands of muesli which don't have
any crap added, but I always find muesli
kind of mushy. I love the breakfast
cereal from my youth but just don't want
all that added garbage.
So, how about groatnola? Groats, of course, starting out with whole,
intact grains, not just groats. Although, we're actually
not using a grain today at all, but buckwheat groats. Buckwheat,
despite its name, has nothing to do with wheat;
it’s not even a grain. It's a starchy seed of a non-
grass plant-family…plant. So, we're going to start by
making these raw groats. We're going to
cook a cup of them. If you have an
Instant Pot, it’s one cup of
buckwheat groats to a cup and a half of water,
pressure cooked for five minutes. I don’t have an
Instant Pot here, so we're just going to
cook it on the stove, but it only takes
ten minutes. Then, we are going to
nuke a sweet potato— a nice big, juicy,
round sweet potato.
We're going to microwave it. It depends on your microwave…
five minutes to ten minutes until it's nice and juicy
and delicious inside. And…we'll be right back. And while we wait… ah, ten minutes is
too much for burpees. So, I’m sorry,
no burpees this time. And we are back.
Buckwheat is done. Throw that in a
big mixing bowl. We have our sweet potato.
Look at that beautiful color there. Don’t burn yourself. And then,
use a potato masher or one of those zigzag wire
ones is a little easier, just to mash this together— the cooked buckwheat and
the cooked sweet potato— until it all becomes nice
and homogeneous. Okay, and then,
we are going to put a teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice and a teaspoon of
just plain cinnamon. It's already smelling good. And then, we are going to
add 12 cups of rolled oats.
If you like big chunks, you can add less
of the rolled oats and if you like it more
like little crunchy bits, you can add more. Now, if you have
dogs at home, what I would do is wait to
put the spices in until the end, and so then, you just
have the three ingredients— the sweet potato,
oats, and buckwheat, and you can roll them
into little balls, and all four of my
dogs love them. Unfortunately, I don’t have
any of my dogs here, so I just added
the spices early, which makes it a little
more evenly distributed throughout the mix. So, you just want to mix this
until it's down to little clumps.
Now, this is going
to make about three cookie trays
worth of groatnola. I like making a
whole big batch; so, this is one sweet
potato’s worth of groatnola. Okay, see, it's this
kind of chunky texture that you might see
with regular granola. Then, take a cookie tray and put about a
third of it in there, and basically, you want
kind of a single layer. Kinda smush it down. And then, put it in the oven
at a low temperature: 250°F for two and a half hours.
If you have a convection setting
and can get some air circulating, that’s even better,
but optional. I put that in, and I have
a tray that's already done. Alright, here's the
finished batch. As you can see it's all light,
crispy, medium chunky. It has the sweetness
from the sweet potato; it has the intact groats
from the buckwheat, the oat goodness. And then, do whatever
you want to do in terms of granola. You can put it on
a smoothie bowl, sprinkle it on some frozen
banana soft-serve ice cream that you make in a
blender or something. I just treat it like regular
breakfast cereal. So, I have a groatnola
base with some berries, some pumpkin seeds,
some walnuts, and then, some
cocoa powder, just because I like
everything chocolatey. Put some unsweetened
soy milk on there, and you are good to go. You will have weeks
of groatnola to enjoy. Would you like
some recipes? Go to the
NutritionFacts.org recipe page, where you will
find recipes where not just every
recipe is health-promoting, but every ingredient of every
recipe is health-promoting— a green light food,
a whole plant food.
So, wait a second, how do you make stuff
sweet without sugar? How do you make stuff
salty without salt? Those are some of the
challenges that we took on to bring you
healthy recipes at the
NutritionFacts.org recipe page. Sweet potatoes are one of
my favorite go-to travel snacks. You will see me
on airplanes whipping out my
microwaved sweet potato. They make perfect
hand warmers. I went to medical
school in chilly Boston. During the winter, microwaved two sweet
potatoes in the morning, put them in my
jacket pockets to keep my hands
nice and warm, and then a perfect,
healthy snack for later on. Yeah, I love
sweet potatoes..
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