Thursday Experiment - Okara Granola

It has been really fun to try new things in the journey to greenness. Last week, I learned how to make soy milk at home. It's so easy that I've already made it again. When you make soy milk, you are left with the squished out chopped beans -- if you squeeze them really well to get all the soy milk out, you are left with dry fluffy okara.

There are many recipes for using okara. I was skeptical, but I decided to give okara granola a try. I had dried the raw okara for about 90 minutes in a low oven, then kept it in the refrigerator. Because we put sugar and vanilla in the soy milk before filtering it, our okara has a sort of cookie-like smell which is very nice. My two year old started eating it with a spoon -- "yummy beans mommy". I figured that if she was eating it straight up, then we should start using it.

I googled "okara granola" and found several recipes. My favorite is the one at Zlamushka's spicy kitchen. I chose this recipe because I had all the ingredients and because it did not call for oil, which I thought was interesting. Most granola recipes seem to use a lot of fat. This one used yogurt (weird, huh?)

It was great! In fact, it's better than great! It may be the best granola I've ever had. My kids are eating it. I'm eating it. You would never guess that beans are the main ingredient. Once again, C and I looked at each other in amazement. The only drawback is that it takes a long time to cook (again, about 90 minutes in a low oven). I have two comments on the granola-making:

1. I don't think I needed to cook the raw okara before using it in the granola. Cooking it twice seems like overkill (of course, ours was already cooked before we decided what to do with it, but next time....)

2. I would use more yogurt in the recipe. I like chunkier granola, and the yogurt seemed to be the thing that made the granola stick together.

Try it out -- you'll love it!