Tierra Farm Tour & Making Granola 3 Ways!

Hello everyone. It's great to see you again. We are headed to a local shop this morning because I need to buy ingredients for a big baking project. We are going to make several different kinds of granola, so please take a drive with me. The drive from my house to Tierra Farm is only four minutes, but I really love the view. This trip to Tierra Farm turns out to be more interesting than I had anticipated. I feel honored to share the experience with you. Tierra Farm is an environmentally conscious food manufacturer, so I feel good about buying my granola ingredients here. For today's big granola making project, I am looking for oats, nuts, seeds, shredded coconut, and dried berries. I'm amazed I am finding everything I need in this store. I love this place. This is my source for almond butter whenever I make almond butter cookies, which is rather frequently. Tierra is well known for their fair trade coffee. Just now I am buying Honduran beans for a cold brew that I will make this weekend. Cold brewed coffee requires a coarse grind. And here is where the excitement begins. Lisette and I were allowed to film the coffee roasting process. This is a big deal for me because I have never seen the fascinating procedure. These bags are filled with coffee beans that are purchased by Tierra Farm from sources all over the world and always at fair trade prices. As you can see, the beans are green in their unroasted state. The beans are roasted by Dan Dwyer, who of course is a coffee connoisseur. Dan relies not only on his sense of taste, but also on his senses of sight and hearing to determine when the beans have achieved their peak of roasted perfection. I don't know what this paddle machine is called, but it is used to aerate the beans and to cool them down. Coffee bean roasting is a true art. Shanna Pickwick is responsible for the organic food gardens at Tierra Farm. She gave us a tour of the gardens and let us nibble on nasturtium blossoms and raspberries. Yum! Shanna uses naturally growing clover as a living mulch between rows of vegetable plantings. Perhaps I should use the same system in my own garden. We are home and I wanted to show you the haul from Tierra Farm. Rolled oats, oh and everything here is organic and everything is packaged in 100% compostable bags. I love that. So I have two bags of the rolled oats because we are going to make a lot of granola today. Berry-berry mix. These are dried berries. Raw sunflower seeds. Raw pumpkin seeds. Dried blueberries, which I could eat by the handful. Raw sliced almonds. Salted hazelnuts, which I will chop up. Shredded coconut. Dried goji berries. These are high in antioxidants, I think. I will have to check on that. And dark chocolate chips, which are made right at Tierra Farm. I also got some, what is this? Raw organic honey. Maple syrup. And of course, the coffee that you saw me grind. I'm going to turn this into cold brewed coffee in another episode. I am preheating my oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit or 160 degrees Celsius. And then I need 4 cups of rolled oats. These would be old-fashioned rolled oats, not the instant type. The old-fashioned have a better texture for granola. I'm actually going to weigh this out. 4 cups or 360 grams. Then I need 1 cup or 100 grams of shredded coconut. This is unsweetened coconut. 1 cup or 92 grams of sliced almonds. 1 cup or 120 grams of sunflower seeds. I'm going to give this a good mix. Then I am going to add 3 fourths cup or 180 mils of coconut oil. And I did put the coconut oil in the microwave just briefly to melt it. You want the oil to be in its liquid form. Then I need 1 third cup or 80 mils of the maple syrup. I also need 1 and a half teaspoons of ground cinnamon. And a half teaspoon of salt. And mix. I will be adding some of the dried fruit after this is baked. If you bake the dried fruit, it will melt. Pour this mixture onto a parchment lined baking sheet. Spread it out. I'm going to bake this until the mixture turns lightly brown. That will take 40 to 45 minutes. And halfway through baking time, I will stir up the ingredients. I do not have to wash out the bowl because I'm going to make another variety of granola, which will contain some of the same ingredients. For this batch, I am using oats, pumpkin seeds, and coarsely chopped hazelnuts. Then I am stirring in coconut oil, maple syrup, cinnamon, and salt. Stir until everything is coated with the oil and the maple syrup. Pour it out. So I'm making a third batch that is pretty much identical to the first granola that I showed you. Third batch. Now the big difference between all of these batches will be the dried fruit that I add or don't add at the end. You are the boss of your own granola. And I'm trying to decide if I want to make granola bars. I have to think about that for a moment. I don't want this video to be too long. So into the oven. The granola is done. It has colored beautifully. I'm going to let it cool and then we can have fun adding some colorful additions. The granola has cooled. I'm just transferring this to a large bowl. If your granola has clumped at all, just break it up with a spoon, unless you want the clumps. In this batch, I'm going to add dried goji berries and dried blueberries. I think the red and blue combination will look pretty. I'm just mixing everything together. This is very colorful. Then you can pack the granola into Ziploc bags or jars. I'm going to use, I think, mostly jars today. I have these wonderful leak-proof lids from Ball. And I will link these in the comments below if you are interested. Granola is shelf-stable for quite a while. You can store it on the counter for, oh, at least two weeks. Or you can refrigerate it. You can even freeze it. This is the batch with the pumpkin seeds. I think I'm not going to add any extras to it. I will just enjoy it as is. If you don't have these lids, you can always use standard canning lids and rings. There we are. Third batch. In this batch, I'm going to add this colorful mix of dried berries. Let's see. What's in here? Well, it's not all berries. Organic raisins. Everything's organic in here. Let's see. Raisins, blueberries, cranberries, goji berries, mulberries, golden berries, and pomegranate arils. Let me clean up my mess and then we can see how productive we were today. So look at all of the granola we made. So I have one, two, three, four, five, six quarts and two and a half pints of granola. I'm going to save the chocolate chips and the honey that we bought earlier and use them for granola bars. That will be a separate video. Now, of course, I need to try some of this granola and I'm going to have it with plain yogurt from Hawthorne Valley Farm. You and I visited that farm several weeks ago. I'll try to remember to post a link to that video in the description below. Now, which granola do I want? Many choices here. Since this one is only half full, I think I'm going to use it. It's the one with the pumpkin seeds and the hazelnuts. First, some yogurt. This would be delicious on ice cream. A taste. Very crunchy. Super delicious. Better than anything you could possibly buy at a store. And when you make it yourself, you control all of the ingredients. I don't know about you, but I could eat yogurt and granola for breakfast, lunch and dinner and dessert. Well, we had a very productive day today. I hope you enjoyed the tour of Tierra Farm as much as I did. I only learned today that Tierra Farm ships nationally. I can put a link to their website in the description below if you are interested. And please do give this granola recipe a try. I will put a link to the basic recipe in the description below. I hope you have a perfect weekend and I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Bye for now.