The Kitchn: How to make crunchy granola in the slow cooker
Homemade granola just may be why breakfast is my favorite meal of the day and why I will always say yes to breakfast for dinner. After all, it's toasted, crunchy oats tossed with a medley of nuts and seeds with just enough maple syrup and brown sugar for a hint of sweetness and flavor. What's not to love? When you make granola in a slow cooker you get all that, plus the ability to make a huge batch at once with far less to clean up than when you make it the traditional, oven-based way. And if you were concerned about the crunch, rest assured, we've discovered the simple solution for that as well.
Your slow-cooker granola template
Think of this as more of a template than a recipe. One of the things I love about making granola is that it doesn't call for too much precision or overly exact measurements. Instead, it's easy to customize to suit your taste; you can swap ingredients and adjust others to get your granola just the way you like it. The ratios are really the most important part (even though there's even some wiggle room there for further tweaking). What you want to remember is to keep the same ratio of dry to liquid ingredients overall.
The one-bowl granola solution
As if granola in the slow cooker wasn't good enough, it still gets better. You're looking at a one-bowl, one-spoon cooking situation. Instead of mixing the dry ingredients in one bowl, the wet ingredients in a second bowl, and then combining everything together, we're simplifying things. After all, simplicity is the heart and soul of slow-cooker recipes.
The big-batch game-changer
I don't make granola as often as I'd really like to, so when I do make it I love to double or sometimes even triple the recipe so it lasts a while longer. There's a couple hang-ups with this, though: Oven-cooked granola is best made when the ingredients are spread out in a layer across a baking sheet, so taking the big-batch approach requires you to have at least a few handy, followed by the even trickier task of attempting to fit multiple baking sheets in the oven.
The slow cooker turns out to be the solution to both of those issues. No extra bakeware needed, and as long as the ingredients will fit in the bowl you can go for as big a batch as you want.
The trick to toasty Oats
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