the genesis of our flax-granola

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Published on Thursday, 14 July 2011 02:00

Written by doug

A lot of people ordering our products are asking for nutrition fact labeling. We want to get that information and have reserved space on our labels for that information but we just don't have it yet. I have detailed nutritional analyses on the Cran Walnut flax granola and can provide that if anyone wants it but I'm looking for the standard nutrition fact labeling and I imagine most everyone else is also.

So why don't we have it?

This all just happened so fast.

This time a year ago we were still baking in my home certified kitchen. We live in an old Victorian with a beautifully revamped kitchen but it was still a home kitchen and we were building a local following and we needed big ovens and a lot more space if we were going to support ourselves. And then, boom, right when we needed it, the old Moose Lodge (mooseexchange.org) two blocks from our house was being converted to a community center/artist studio space. They also happened to have a huge kitchen and the plan was to convert it to a community kitchen. Michael and I jumped right in. I rented a space in the building that was right above the kitchen with an old freight elevator that had direct access. Still, it took another three months of hard work to fix up the kitchen to get it certified. Once we had some big convection ovens to play with, we went right to work. Oddly, we struggled to get the kind of beautiful artisan loaves we coaxed out of my home oven but the flax-granola we were developing looked even more promising than what we were getting from my home oven.

We also discovered we could bake the flax-granola at a much lower temperature and, better yet, these ovens ran fans even when the heat was off. This was crucial because it allowed us to circulate air over the flax-granola, drawing off moisture even as the ovens cooled.

Meanwhile - and here's where this story takes an incredible turn and why you're even possibly reading this - out of nowhere came one of those million in one happen-stances that defy all odds yet somehow define our universe.

A good customer for our sprouted whole-grain bread stopped by our street stand one day and we got to talking. He was ecstatic about meeting a beautiful young woman from Manhattan and described her as extremely health conscious. I had just that day taken some of our early recipe flax-granola and rolled it into a snack bar (something you'll be hearing more about one of these days) and asked him to give it to her to see what she thought. Michael and I were always looking for ways to use flax in our bread but we also wanted to develop a granola around flax seed but just hadn't hit on how best to do it.

Anyway, that woman from Manhattan was Lyn Genet. A few weeks later she called and we talked and I sent her more samples. A few weeks after that she came to see us here in Bloomsburg. She really liked our granola but made it clear that we didn't need to add oats or honey or anything that was traditionally found in most granolas.

We knew enough about flax to know that it clumps naturally when it gets wet and the more we worked with it, the more we realized it made a perfectly natural granola all on its own. Further, flax offers the most benefit when you chew it rather than eating the seeds whole. Well, you chew granola. So we kept refining the recipe - trying different spices, trying different bases. And we kept modifying the technique used in baking it then tested it out some more until we had something we were really excited about. As it happened, Lyn loved it. Our friends loved it. We loved it. And now maybe you're trying it too. So let us know what you think.

Doug
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