Recipe for Sugar-Free Apricot Muesli | Yummy

Granola consists of crunchy clusters of toasted oats, nuts, seeds, and sometimes dried fruit. The ingredients are usually held together by oil and a sweetener such as honey, syrup, or brown sugar.

The main ingredient in granola is oats, but you can combine it with other grains like buckwheat, like we did in your recipe, or even puffed rice.

We made our muesli with a combination of hazelnuts, pumpkin seeds and sunflower seeds. Other tasty alternatives you can try are:

• Walnuts, pecans, almonds or cashews

• Chia seeds, sesame seeds, hemp seeds or flaxseeds

Adding dried fruit pieces to your granola mix will help you sweeten those crunchy clusters without refined sugar. In our recipe we used dried chopped apricots, but you can also opt for:

• Prunes, figs or mango

• Dried berries such as cranberries, goji berries, raisins, or blueberries

• Banana chips and coconut flakes for a tropical twist

Finally, you can enhance your homemade granola with:

• Ground cinnamon and ginger

• Vanilla

• Bee pollen, matcha, açai or baobab powder

The benefit of making your own granola from scratch is that you have complete control over the ingredients. It’s so easy to make crispy granola clusters without adding refined sugar, honey or syrup.

In our recipe, we turned pitted dates into a dense paste by soaking them in hot water and then pureeing them in a food processor. Then we used this paste as a binding agent for the granola ingredients instead of using honey or other syrups.

This way you have the same sticky clusters but with a fraction of the sugar and more nutrients. Dates have almost 40% less sugar by weight and four times more fiber than white sugar.

As an alternative to dates, you can try:

• Bananas: Mash ripe bananas with a tablespoon of lemon juice

• applesauce: You can either make it from scratch following our recipe here, or use store-bought applesauce (made with no added sugar).

• pumpkin puree: Roast, steam or boil pumpkin and then puree into a creamy puree.

• mashed sweet potatoes: Roast, steam or boil sweet potatoes, then mash to a velvety puree. See how we made it in these Sweet Potato Breakfast Cookies.

If you suffer from a nut allergy, you can still enjoy delicious homemade granola. Follow our recipe as above, but swap out the hazelnuts with the same amount of kernels. Pumpkin, sunflower, sesame, chia, and flax seeds are great alternatives to nuts.