Recipe: Sourdough Discard Granola 2.0

A Breaducation preview recipe

I published a recipe for a sourdough discard granola early last year, but by then I’d only been making it for a few weeks. Since then I have made it nearly every other week, in vast quantities and it has evolved substantially during this time. It was always very good, but there’s at least one person I know who considers it “the best granola evar,” and since he’s a reader here, I thought it would be a good idea to share the much-updated recipe.

This is also the first recipe from the book I’m sharing outside of the Breaducation testing group. As I mentioned on Monday, those are mainly dough formulas in testing. There are other recipes going into the book that are bread-adjacent, and many of those involve the use of sourdough discard (something that I have A LOT OF these days, since I’m baking sourdough every day, and feeding my four different starters at room temperature once or twice a day to keep them in top shape).

As with all of my sourdough discard recipes, the point is to both use up as much as possible in one go and to have the inclusion of it serve an useful function in the recipe (I have no patience for recipes that utilize a “homeopathic” amount of discard, one that an equal amount of flour and water could replace without consequence). In this case, the discard acts as the “glue” binding the granola clusters together.

The updates to the granola recipe are mainly refinements to the procedure and to the headnote, but all of them are important to ensure that it cooks evenly and fully. Along with some tips for varying the flavors and mix-ins once you get the hang of things. A few notes: I now mix and make the granola right away, since I’m impatient and I’ve found there’s little benefit to letting the mixture sit before baking it. And I doubled the yield, because you might as well make a lot each time you do.

All of these sneak preview recipes are going to be subscriber-only, so you know what you need to do to get in on them if you aren’t one already. For those who are, hit me up with questions or thoughts in the comments below.

—Andrew