What’s for Breakfast? These Nuts!

Because we are chicken tenders, Mr. Food It Yourself and I frequently eat eggs for breakfast. However, our flock has been freeloading. Hennifer Aniston is still admitted to Kitchen Heneral Hospital, so she gets a pass. Our other six layers have not laid a single egg since November. This means we have been eating other foods for breakfast. We are quite fond of grape-nuts cereal. Did you know you can make this classic ready-to-eat breakfast yourself? Well you can!

I like the recipe for Mother’s Grape-Nuts from the More With Less Cookbook, compiled by Doris Janzen Longacre from submissions by the World Mennonite Community. (This is one of my very favorite cookbooks. I highly recommend it!<3) The ingredients* are perfectly mundane:

• 3 cups whole wheat flour
• 1/2 cup wheat germ
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• pinch salt
• 2 cups buttermilk

The first step is to preheat the oven to 350F and mix everything together. I like to combine the dry ingredients first, then add the buttermilk. My brown sugar was from a new package and kind of wet, so it made some large lumps. I passed the dry ingredients through a sieve to break the lumps.

With the buttermilk stirred in, I spread the thick batter onto a silicone-lined cookie sheet. You can use parchment paper if you do not have a silicone liner. Or you can simply grease the cookie sheet. Bake for 25-30 minutes; it will have the texture of a muffin or quick-bread. I transferred my baked cereal loaf to a cooling rack. While it is cooling, let me explain the asterisk on the ingredients.

*Whole Wheat Flour and Wheat Germ These will spoil/go rancid faster than white flour. I store mine in the freezer to slow this spoilage.

*Brown Sugar One cup is a lot, I think. I use half a cup, and the finished cereal is still sweeter than what you buy at the supermarket. Feel free to adjust the quantity and type of sweetener to your own liking.

*Baking Soda Just make sure you are using bicarbonate of soda (NaCO3), the stuff in the little cardboard box. Do not use baking powder, the stuff in the little cardboard canister.

*Salt Just make sure you are using table salt, (NaCl) not KCl or MgSO4.

*Buttermilk I know… nobody keeps buttermilk in the house these days. Thankfully, there are plenty of substitutes you can use. You can add one tablespoon of vinegar or lemon juice to one cup of regular milk. You can also mix one and three-quarters teaspoons of cream of tarter to regular milk. My interweb searches note that vegan milk substitutes (like soy, almond and oat milk) work just dandy with these acid additions. My favorite method is to use plain yogurt, mixed with water or milk in a 50:50 ratio. I have shown this before, but incase you missed it:

When the loaf is cool enough to handle, but still warm, crumble it against the large holes of a grater. You can also cool the loaf completely and give it a spin in a blender or food processor. (Use the pulse setting so you can control the size of the crumbles.) Spread the crumbles on a baking sheet or pan- something with sides- and put back in the oven at 250F. I used one jelly-roll pan and one casserole dish. You don’t want the crumbles layered too deep.

I find that if I turn the oven off when I remove the loaf, I can turn it back on when the grating is done and it is at just about 250F. Your oven may differ.

After 15 minutes, give the crumbles a good stir. Keep toasting and stirring until the crumbles are uniformly dry and crisp. I usually start with 10 minute intervals and then go to 5 minute intervals as they near ideal crispiness.

A side note: please remind me to ask Mr. Food It Yourself for a proper half sheet pan for my birthday. I could totally make these on a single pan if I had a proper half sheet pan.

I know what you are all thinking- why are they called “grape-nuts” when they contain neither grapes nor nuts? I wondered the same thing. I found this delightful video on YouTube which explains it all:

If you go to the Post Cereal website, they have some fun facts about the cereal’s history.

Mr. Food It Yourself enjoyed the home-made grape nuts for breakfast this morning. He reports that he found them “delightfully crunchy” and he enjoyed the molasses flavor of the brown sugar. D0ttMatrix even took a taste. She had no comment, and simply went back to her late morning nap.

Ready-to-eat breakfast cereals were among the first mass-produced, highly advertised food products. I can not decide if it is ironic or perfectly appropriate to DIY grape nuts. I do know that I will keep making them until the fluffy slackers in the back yard start laying again.

What is a commercially made food that you prefer to make yourself? What corporate copy-cat recipes have you tried and decided it is better to buy? Share in the comments!