Sustainability made simple

Granola Bars Recipe: How to Make Them Quickly and Sustainably

Photo: CC0 Public Domain / Unsplash - Hayley Maxwell

With our quick and easy granola bar recipe, you can make the snack yourself. Homemade granola bars are healthier that those from the supermarket and free of palm oil and plastic.

Granola bars are a healthy snack, since they’re packed full of healthy grains, nuts, and dried fruits. Those ingredients fill you up and deliver an energy punch. Our granola bar recipe is quick and easy.

Granola Bars Recipe: Ingredients

We always recommend buying organic ingredients whenever possible. For 12 granola bars, you’ll need:

  • 1/3 cup shelled nuts or seeds (i.e., almonds, hazelnuts, sunflower seeds)
  • 2/3 cup dried fruit (i.e., raisins, craisins, prunes)
  • 1 apple
  • 1/3 cup flour
  • 1/3 cup oats
  • 2 tbs honey or agave syrup

Granola Bars Recipe: Step by Step

  1. Finely grate the apple and chop the nuts, seeds, and dried fruits into small pieces.
  2. Mix these together with the remaining ingredients.
  3. Cover a baking sheet with parchment and spread the mixture evenly to half-inch thickness across the sheet.
  4. Bake at 350 degrees (convection) for around 30 minutes.
  5. Cut into bars while still warm, then allow to cool completely.
  6. Store in a cool, dry place for 1-2 weeks.

Experiment with Your Own Healthy Granola Bar Variations

This recipe allows for a lot of experimentation. You can use whichever nuts, seeds, or dried fruits you want or simply have on hand. You can replace oats with many other types of grains, brans, or even cereals. If it’s a special kind of crunch you’re after, try adding puffed amaranth or quinoa.

Vegans can use agave, maple, or other sweetener syrups instead of honey. You can also substitute regional or homemade sweeteners like dandelion honey, pear syrup, apple sugar, molasses, sugar beet syrup, or rice syrup. There are no limits to what you can imagine, so give it a try and let us know in the comments how your experiments turned out!

Benefits of Homemade Healthy Granola Bars

The small amount of work involved in making your own granola bars is easily rewarded by the cost savings over store-bought bars. You don’t need a calculator to figure that out.

Further, you managed to save a ton of plastic garbage from landing in the dump or our oceans.

Our granola bar recipe is healthier than most industrially-produced granola bars, which rely on adding refined sugars and palm oil. The latter is produced via ruthless destruction of rainforests in Southeast Asia, so avoid this ingredient whenever possible.

In conclusion, making your own granola bars instead of purchasing them helps the environment and does your health a favor as well.

Read more: Recipe: Make Your Own Granola Bars, Quickly and Sustainably

This article was translated from German by Hilary. You can view the original here: Müsliriegel selber machen: So geht’s schnell und nachhaltig

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