TracyFood

Ask TracyFood: about my granola 9 September 2008 10:10 am

Posted by Tracy in : Morning Glory, advice, baking, breakfast, cooking, health, ingredients, restaurants , trackback

So a few weeks ago, I got an email:

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Hi, Tracy.

I heard that Padnah’s Pit BBQ is now serving Tracy’s Granola.

First, is this your granola?

If so, is it gluten free? (i.e. no wheat products, rye or barley … and are the oats from a dedicated, wheat-free source, such as Bob’s Red Mill?)

Many of us are gluten intolerant or have full-blown Celiac disease, and most granola uses oats that share process facilities with wheat flour manufacturing, so every grain of oats has a small amount of flour on it, making it dangerous.

If you’re the one making this granola people are raving about and you have not been processing it with gluten free ingredients, your market would increase HUGELY if you began doing so and labeled the packaging with “GLUTEN FREE”.

I appreciate your time and hope to hear from you …. I miss granola!

Sincerely,

Carolyn
Portland, OR

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Here’s what I wrote back:

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Hi Carolyn,

I’ve never heard of Padnah’s Pit BBQ (is it the same as Podnah’s Pit: http://www.podnahspit.com ?), and I only make granola for my own personal use (except on one memorable occasion at Morning Glory Café in Eugene) so it’s pretty much impossible for the granola served at any restaurant anywhere to be mine in the sense that I made it. It might be “my” recipe (though I’m reluctant to claim it in any real sense of the word since all I did was adapt a Moosewood formula to my own personal taste and post the result on my food blog, as you’ve probably seen: http://www.tracyfood.com/2007/04/11/tracy-granola/). I’d be very flattered if that was in fact the case, and now I’m curious and will try to contact Podnah’s (although that menu doesn’t look like that of a particularly granola-serving establishment) but let me know what you find out if you beat me to asking them! Because that is my advice: ask Podnah’s if their granola is gluten-free, and go from there. Alternatively, the recipe doesn’t call for any wheat, rye, or barley, so you could easily use it to make your very own gluten-free granola… and I’d be really happy if it helped reunite you with a food you sorely miss, so if you decide to give my recipe a try, please let me know how it turns out!

Thanks for writing,
-Tracy

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Epilogue

Carolyn wrote back yesterday to tell me that I’d found the right Podnah’s Pit, and that they serve granola at their Sunday brunch, and that the granola in question also appears at Portland Whole Foods and other upscale markets. I’m genuinely curious to hear more about it, and whether it turns out to be gluten-free (which should be fun and easy — with carefully sourced ingredients, there’s no reason for granola to be celiac-unfriendly). So Portland friends! Could you keep an eye out for me?