Brian versus Big Cereal

For most of the years we've lived together, Brian has had a cutoff price of 10 cents per ounce for breakfast cereal. Any more than that, and he just won't buy it. We set this limit back when we were first married, based on the estimated cost of our main alternative, homemade granola. I worked out that a batch of granola made according to the recipe from The Tightwad Gazette weighed about a pound and cost about $1.60 to make, so we concluded that if the boxed cereals from the store could beat that price, they were a good deal.

Although prices have risen in the years since, we've never adjusted our benchmark price, because it made the math so easy. Unfortunately, what's not so easy anymore is staying within this price limit. For the past six years or so, Brian has relied almost exclusively on the raisin bran from Aldi, the only cereal that reliably met his target price—and last year, the price of that finally rose above the limit. Since we'd joined Costco by that time, we were able to make do for a while by stocking up on Kellogg's Raisin Bran whenever Costco happened to have it for $1.52 a pound. But the last few times we've gone there, that hasn't been available either. We were able to find a bargain once on Life and once on Honey Bunches of Oats, but neither of those is as healthy as Brian's usual breakfast—and on our last trip, they weren't available at our required price either.

So, at this point, Brian had three choices:

1. Accept that prices have gone up and raise his benchmark price;
2. Find something other than cereal to eat for breakfast; or
3. Attempt to come up with a homemade cereal recipe that would be cheaper than the boxed stuff.

Now, the only kind of cold cereal it's reasonably easy to make at home is granola. However, most homemade granola recipes, including the one from The Tightwad Gazette that we based our benchmark on in the first place, are pretty heavily loaded with sugar and oil. Brian has attempted to make a healthier granola before, but even that recipe, though it doesn't taste particularly sweet, still has more sugar in it than he wants to consume every morning at the breakfast table.

This time, however, Brian had a new idea. Based on his experiments with using a flaxseed-water mixture as an egg substitute, he thought he might be able to use this same mixture as a binder to hold the granola together without a lot of oil or sugary syrup. And this worked...sort of. The granola did in fact stay together, but it was awfully tough and chewy. Also, the two tablespoons of sugar he'd included in his mini test batch weren't enough to give it any discernible sweetness, and he was reluctant to increase the sugar much beyond this point.

So, after a couple of unsuccessful attempts at this flaxseed-based recipe, he decided to try a different tack. He'd use a more standard granola recipe, but then he'd cut that with plain oats when eating it, the way he currently does with his raisin bran. This way, the total amount of sugar in one bowlful of cereal would stay the same, but the sweetness would be more concentrated in the granola chunks instead of spread across the entire bowl, so it would be easier to taste. And this would also allow him to ditch the flaxseed mixture and go with a more standard sugar-oil base.

So he whipped up a small batch like this, and found that it was indeed much tastier than the flaxseed stuff. In fact, it was so tasty that he feared he would be tempted to snack on it, which would (a) not be very healthy and (b) not leave him any for breakfast. I suggested fixing this problem by cutting the granola with plain oats immediately, as soon as it was cool, rather than doing it by the bowl every morning. This would also save him time in the morning. Brian liked this idea, since even if he did snack on the cereal, in this form it would be healthier than most other things he might be inclined to snack on (such as his current favorite indulgence, peanuts with chocolate chips).

After a little more tinkering with the recipe to adjust the sugar and oil as low as possible, Brian came up with his current version, which I'm calling

BRIAN'S LOW-SUGAR COCONUT GRANOLA, VERSION 3.0

Combine in a bowl:

• 4 c. rolled oats
• 1/2 c. chopped walnuts
• 1/4 c. wheat bran
• 1/4 c. flaxseeds
• 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla
• 1/2 c. honey
• 1/4 c. melted coconut oil

Spread the mixture out in a baking pan and and bake at 350°F for 10 minutes. Take it out, stir it around, then bake another 5 minutes. (Remove promptly, or it will burn.)
Stir in:

• 1 c. raisins
• 5 c. rolled oats

Store in an airtight container.

This recipe is both tasty enough and healthy enough to make a reasonable substitute for Brian's usual breakfast mixture of raisin bran, oats, and flaxseeds. The question is, how does it compare price-wise?

According to my calculations, at the prices we currently pay, an entire batch of this contains $1.26 worth of oats, $.62 worth of walnuts, $.20 worth of flaxseeds, $.90 worth of honey, and $.70 worth of coconut oil. That's $3.68, which we can round up to $3.75 to account for the cinnamon, salt, and vanilla. And Brian reckons it's enough for eight bowls, so that works out to about 47 cents per bowl.

His current breakfast is: $0.39 worth of raisin bran (at its new, higher price), about $0.05 worth of oats, and about $0.03 worth of flaxseeds. (This doesn't include the cost of his homemade walnut milk, since he'll use an equal amount of that with either breakfast.) So the raisin bran breakfast comes to...47 cents per bowl, exactly the same as the homemade granola.

So, cost-wise, the two breakfasts are equal. It's all a question of which Brian finds more tiresome: going to Aldi for raisin bran, or baking granola. For now, he's enjoying the homemade granola, so he plans to stick with it for a while. But if he ever gets tired of making granola every week, he can go back to the Aldi raisin bran at its current price of 11.7 cents per ounce and not feel like he's getting ripped off. And, moving forward, any time we find an interesting-looking cereal at Costco for under 12 cents per ounce, we can go ahead and snap it up, knowing it compares reasonably well to what we're eating now.