From Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
Granola is a breakfast food and snack food consisting of rolled
oats, nuts, honey and sometimes rice, which is baked until crispy. During
the baking process the mixture is stirred to maintain a loose, breakfast
cereal type consistency. Dried fruit, particularly raisins or dates, are
sometimes also added.
Besides being a breakfast food and snack food, granola is often eaten
when hiking or camping because it is lightweight, high in energy, and easy
to store; these properties are similar to trail mix.
Granola is often eaten in combination with yogurt or other cereal. It can
also be used as a topping in pastries and desserts.
Granula
The names Granula, Granola and
Ganolietta were trademarks in the late nineteenth century United
States for foods consisting of whole grain products crumbled and baked until
crispy; compare the contemporary Swiss invention, muesli. The name is no
longer trademarked except in Australia where it is by the Australian Health
& Nutrition Association Ltd.'s Sanitarium Health Food Company.
Granula
was invented in Dansville, New York, by Dr. James Caleb Jackson at the
Jackson Sanitarium in 1863. The Jackson Sanitarium was a prominent health
spa that operated into the early twentieth century on the hillside
overlooking Dansville. It was also known as Our Home on the Hillside and so
the company formed to sell his cereal was known as the Our Home Granula
Company. Granula was made of Graham flour and similar to oversized
Grape-Nuts.
A similar cereal was developed by the Seventh-day Adventist doctor John
Harvey Kellogg. It too was initially known as Granula, but the name was
changed to Granola to avoid legal problems with Jackson.
Crunchy Granola
The food and name were revived in the 1960s, and fruits and nuts were
added to it to make it a health food popular with the hippie movement.
Several people claim to have revived or re-invented granola then.
A major promoter was Layton Gentry, profiled in Time as "Johnny
Granola-Seed"[1].
In 1964, Gentry sold the rights to a granola recipe using oats, which he
claimed to have invented himself, to Sovex Natural Foods for $3,000. The
company was founded in 1953 in Holly, Michigan by the Hurlinger family to
make a concentrated paste of brewers yeast and soy sauce named Sovex.
Earlier in 1964, it had been bought by John Goodbrad and moved to
Collegedale, Tennessee. In 1967, Gentry bought back the rights for west of
the Rockies for $1,500 and then sold the West Coast rights to Wayne
Schlotthauer of Lassen Foods in Chico, California for $18,000[2].
Lassen was founded from a health food bakery run by Schlotthauer's
father-in-law[3]. The Hurlingers,
Goodbrads, and Schlotthauers were all Adventists and it is possible that
Gentry was a lapsed Adventist who was familiar with the earlier granola.
Granola made a major appearance at the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art
Festival.[4].
In 1972, Jim Matson, an executive at Pet Milk (later Pet Incorporated) of
Saint Louis, Missouri, introduced Heartland Natural Cereal, the first major
commercial granola[5]. At almost
the same time, Quaker introduced Quaker 100% Natural Granola. Within a year,
Kellogg's introduced Country Morning and General Mills Nature Valley[6].
In 1974, McKee Baking (later McKee Foods), makers of Little Debbie snack
cakes, purchased Sovex. In 1998, they also acquired the Heartland brand and
moved its manufacturing to Collegedale. In 2004, Sovex's name was changed to
Blue Planet Foods[7][8][9].
Granola bar
Close-up of a chewy granola bar showing the detail of their
pressed shape
"Granola bars" were invented by Stanley Mason [1] [2]and have become
popular as a snack. The granola bars are identical to normal granola except
in their shape. Instead of a loose, breakfast cereal consistency, granola
bars are pressed into a bar shape and baked into that shape. The result was
a more convenient snack.
Another variety is the chewy granola bar. In this variety, the oats are
not baked as long (or at all) for a chewy texture. Some question whether
such a snack should be called granola at all; in fact, some manufacturers
prefer cereal bar or snack bar.
Notes
-
^
Time 1972
-
^
Time 1972
-
^
Klein 1978
-
^
Woodstock and Granola, <http://www.woodstockpreservation.org/Granola1.htm>.
Retrieved on 16 December 2006
-
^
Klein 1978
-
^
Bruce 1995 p.244
-
^
Blue Planet Foods, Inc. history, <http://www.blueplanetfoods.net/history.htm>.
Retrieved on 16 December 2006
-
^
Heartland® History, <http://www.heartlandbrands.com/AboutHeartland/History.htm>.
Retrieved on 16 December 2006
-
^
McKee Foods Company History, <http://www.mckeefoods.com/About_us/Company_History>.
Retrieved on 16 December 2006
-
^
Tom Dalzell & Terry Victor. The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and
Unconventional English, vol. 1. Routledge, London, 2006. p.909. ISBN
10:0-415-25937-1
References
-
"Johnny
Granola-Seed", Time, Mar. 06, 1972, <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,910236,00.html>
-
Klein, Joe (Feb. 23, 1978), "A Social History of Granola",
Rolling Stone (no. 259): pp. 40-44
-
Bruce, Scott & Crawford, Bill
(1995), Cerealizing America : The Unsweetened Story of American
Breakfast Cereal, pp. 8, 21, 243-246