Okay. I have been making granola for dunno over five years. Here’s my once uber-non-public recipe. Combine the Goop Mess and Espresso with the Dry Mix. Bake, stir, and cool. Easy. Expectable IP comment to follow.
Goop Mess
6 T coconut oil
1 T brown sugar
2 T honey
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 c unsweetened coconut flakes
1/2 c golden flax meal
1/4 c chia seeds
vanilla
coffee liqueur
Espresso
3/4 c decalf espresso
Dry Mix
3 c rolled oats
1/2 c raw pumpkin seeds
1/2 c roasted, unsalted sunflower seeds
Heat oven to 315F. Brew the espresso. Make the dry mix and stir to mix well. In a saucepan heat (medium-low heat) the goop mess until it bubbles. Add the espresso. Slowly sprinkle in the flax and chia, stirring the while. Bring back to a slow burping boil. Remove from the burner and let sit for a couple of minutes. Add the goop mess to the dry mix. Stir until things are thoroughly mixed. Then stir a little more. Line a 11 x 17 baking pan with parchment. Spread the goop mess mix onto the parchment to form an even layer. Bake 15 min. Stir. Bake 15 min. Stir some more. Bake 15 min. Final stir. Turn off oven and let sit for 15 min or until desired crispiness. Will get crispier as it cools. Remove from oven. Let cool until cool. Then store.
Variation: Add dark chocolate chips after the goop mess mix is spread on the parchment, or after the goop mess mix has baked for 45 minutes and is sitting in the warm oven. Variations: Add second T of brown sugar or use agave syrup instead of honey.
Note: if you use gluten-free rolled oats, this recipe is pretty much gluten-free.
Another note: I never measure the vanilla and coffee liqueur. Try that.
Added note: Coffee liqueur may be Kahlúa.
Gratuitous explanatory note: The combination of rum, cinnamon, and vanilla is “pirate.”
Further note: I never leave any pumpkin seeds in the mixing bowl. Anything else is okay.
Editorial note: Yes, it’s decalf. The “l” is silent. That’s just how I do it. Whimsy. Let it go.
Note on “stir”: I use a spatula to turn the granola a column at a time. It’s complicated.
There you have it. I’ve made granola every two weeks for what? five years or more. Each time it feels like I’ve only done it a few times. Maybe that’s because the recipe has evolved. I started when I found a local company that was making a coffee espresso–Seattle Granola Company. It was good, but a bit expensive, and had added salt, and I had to drive five miles to the nearest store around that carried it, and it could be out of stock. I thought–maybe I can make my own. So I tried various combinations and methods of mixing. The above recipe is my current working version, last used yesterday.
Now, in it’s way, my recipe is both derivative and still its own thing. I read the ingredient list for Seattle Coffee Granola. I guessed the proportions. I added and subtracted ingredients. I worked out my way of combining and baking. Temp. Stirring. Wear a mitt. Getting just the right mix of clumping.
There are a bunch of coffee granola recipes online. I just looked at them today to see what’s out there. All sorts of variations. This is part of what is called “the art.” I suppose I’m one of those with “ordinary skill” in “the art.” What I have created (“invented”) isn’t patentable (thankfully), but it is in its way an “innovation”–something that wasn’t before (at least in my experience) and which I have adopted, but which is well within what is also being done both by folks at home and commercially.
How does my recipe differ from others in “the art”? Well, I use golden flax meal, not mere any flax. I also add chia seeds. So both flax and chia. I brew my espresso rather than sprinkle in coffee grounds. And I use the extra liquid to puff up the flax and chia to make the goop mess all the goopier. Letting the goop mess sit a few minutes helps add body to the goop mess. I don’t see anyone say to let the goop sit. It should slide rather than pour out of the sauce pan into the dry mix and look like a slime mold. I use a lot less sugar than most recipes out there. I used to use agave syrup. That worked too. I haven’t seen recipes doing that. But very high fructose. And I add a liqueur. Don’t have to, of course. But I do. I don’t see anyone doing that. I’m sure it’s done, though. I would expect it to be “in the art.” If no one else is doing it, well, you caught wind of it here first I guess. I use more sunflower seeds and pumpkin seeds than other recipes, and I don’t add salt. If you use Baker’s sweetened coconut flakes, there will be some salt and extra sugar. I started with Baker’s but now use unsweetened–from Cadia, most recently. I don’t use nuts or almond butter (my wife is allergic to nuts). I’ve tried adding dried fruit (“dead” fruit, as I call it) but then it’s like melted gorp or trail mix, and well, you can add dried fruit later to whatever you dish up. For that matter, dish out some granola and add dark chocolate chips to it then. Works. I bake at 315F for 45 minutes. A lot of recipes run a hotter oven for less time, with only one stir session, if any. I find three stir sessions keeps me more active (sigh) and since it works for me, I haven’t bothered to try other variations. Probably about any oven temperature with the right timing would work so long as things get crispy and nothing burns.
Now, would it make sense for me to keep my recipe a secret? Why share it? Don’t I give up the opportunity to, like, profit from it? What if I could patent my granola as a “composition of matter”? It would seem like, even if I could be clever and do so, it would be an intrusion on “the art” and not somehow something that goes beyond what us ordinary skill folks could imagine. Our imagining and “inventing” isn’t the patentable kind, but this is not the case for other areas of art, such as say carbon nanotubes, where every little picky gobbet of something new has gotten patented (a lot of that by university admins insisting on it), so that there never has been an “art” until things eventually hit the public domain after two decades of sitting behind paywalls built by lusty bureaucratic dreams of patent lucre.
Standards, in their way, aim to define within an “art” a set of common specifications and an effort is made to keep the standard within the “art”–even if some elements are proprietary (patented), the use of the patent outside the standard (“non-essential” claims) is different from the use the patent has when claims are dedicated to the standard (“essential” claims). In this way, standards are opposed to what universities say they have to do with patents to make them work in the public interest. That’s because university tech transfer types mostly have never thought about the problem of thirty universities all getting funding in the same area of federal research interest and every last jack russell of them demanding ownership and obtaining patents to license exclusively. Universities do not set as a goal to find a way for inventions made “under their auspices” to find a way into working standards (even though at times, it has happened). A standard is in its way a potentially very valuable intangible asset–a Non-IP Intangible Asset. But no, not happening.
Within a standard, patent claims are used to enforce the standard, to prevent people from claiming to comply with the standard when they don’t. And within a standard, patent claims are used to encourage others to contribute their proprietary bits to the standard. In a way, a standard becomes a kind of industry cluster-cross-license. Either folks get on with things or it all fragments into a mess of special claims that creates gridlock and nothing gets done. The patent everything folks don’t get around to mentioning gridlock, standoffs, and innovation by doing things crappier but at least being free of the patent dolts, rendering all that research invention to save public life essentially irrelevant, despite the efforts of university bureaucrats to sincerely believe in their best practice.
In the patent advocacy that framed the creation of the Bayh-Dole Act (and that advocacy has been happily and uncritically swallowed by university officials), nothing invented will be used or “developed” if it is “available to all.” It has to be patented. The patent preserves the opportunity for a patent holder to profit from the invention. And the patent has to be used to create an effective monopoly–to exclude all others, while the patent holder (or exclusive licensee–effectively the new owner of the patented invention) futzes around to find the financing and expertise to try to make a go of a commercial product. Patent lawyers (including ones working for the federal government) argued that by not patenting inventions made in federally supported work, the federal government was in effect dooming federal research to irrelevance. And, to kick home the point, they added that when the federally government issued patents to itself (think about that–should it even happen?), and then granted royalty-free non-exclusive licenses, and *refused* I tell you, absolutely *refused* to grant exclusive licenses, that was the same as dooming the inventions to non-use, denying the public the benefit of federal research. It was and still is nonsense.
But that nonsense has gripped the country for over forty years. Of course, there still is the question–which was first hotly debated in the mid-1960s–of whether federal research is of much relevance, inventions or no, patents or no. There’s even a decent question that follows up on Vannevar Bush’s recommendation that the federal government not run its own labs for basic science and asks whether scientists working for the federal government with its regulatory power are necessarily compromised from the get-go, worse than they would be, even, working for some big monopoly-tending company. Go ahead, mess with that question for a bit–on the other side of the answer may be a research environment that is more productive than the one we have now, and perhaps even a glimpse of a technology change environment that is not fixated on “systematic” research housed at (and approved by) institutions. So a granola recipe leads to subversive questions about a status quo that everyone seems to agree isn’t working, despite the universities’ claims to glorious success.
As it is, to patent my (how is it “my”?) version of espresso granola might give someone the opportunity to blunder around in the granola recipe art trying to trip up people who figure out that, say, they can put liqueur in their granola, or mix flax and chia. But I don’t see that someone trying to profit in that way improves “the art” or results in “public benefit” or improves the “granola eating experience.” It’s sort of like going fishing by putting so many hooks in the water that nothing can live below your patent claim boat without getting injured even if not caught. But that’s rather what universities have done, making a big deal about having to patent everything and creating “patent thickets” to prevent the formation and movement of an “art” in some emerging area of technology that happens to trend.
Or, should the point of a patent be to prevent people from making things for themselves and instead have to rely on a sole source (“patent monopoly”) supplier who may or may not get around to making a commercial product, and even if they do, it might not be available in all areas, or at a competitive (see–there’s no competition if the patent is used to exclude all others), or without nuts. Is the purpose of the patent system to drive the public to dependency on sole suppliers looking to max their profits or else prevent anyone else from any profits (or making for family and friends). And even if that might be one purpose devised to exploit the patent system, should we expect our universities this purpose as their primary means of using patents? No, really. Honest question. But wait–the universities have already adopted this purpose, and they claim it is for the public benefit. I don’t think their wiring is up to code.
Of course, I could keep my recipe non-public. That would save the hassle of someone hurting themselves because I don’t include in the recipe that they should turn off the burner when they pull the goop mess off. Or that they should use oven mitts (or comparable) when removing the granola from the oven. Maybe if I were to keep my recipe *secret* it would not be in “the art”–or at least, it would not be “public.” Not “on sale.” Not therefore a block to someone else patenting (first to file) what I’ve already known and practiced for at least five years and then showing up to dick with me if they ever get wind of my activity (sort of like what Z Corp did to students at the University of Washington some long time ago, at which UW legal counsel cowardly melted away). Ah well, the things that don’t make into articles about the successes of university IP management.
So here we have an instance of a wee bit of innovation in coffee granola recipes. The IP did not motivate me to figure out a new recipe. The glow of profits and worldly fame failed to entice. By not claiming some proprietary position, I have not failed the public or doomed my recipe. And whether someone adopts my recipe (or “this” recipe) commercially just doesn’t matter to me–though it might amuse. It’s in “the art.” That’s how “the art” works. And if you try Ger’s Espresso Granola, then you will feel how technology transfer can indeed work–license free. Too funny, eh?