I'd leave out the dried fruit and applesauce. Any type of fruit stuff seems to be death to clumpy granola in my experience. Can always include dried fruit later with finished batch.

Definately check out Anna's blog (linked below) with the clumpy granola recipe. She discusses her technique at the start.

Here is a link that might be useful: Clumpy granola

I don't add the dried fruit until the very end after the granola is cool. I did read that about the clumpy granola, which is what prompted me to post. I can't do that exact recipe because of the nut allergy. I've done it with & without a bit of applesauce and it still isn't clumpy enough either way. It totally seems done & crispy after 25 min once it cools, so I was still confused about what is actually making it clumpy. Is there a specific ratio of wet/dry ingredients? The wet is what adds the fat & sugar, so I'm trying to keep that ratio on the lower end & still make sure the mixture gets well coated. It doesn't seem to stick much to my pans, so I didn't think parchment paper is the answer. I've done it with & without honey too, so I don't think it's the honey per say that makes it clump.

I wonder if the amount of liquid is high compared to the baked dry ingredients. The recipe that I've used has about 1/3 cup of fat (butter) and 1/3 cup of liquid sweet ingredients (honey) to about 5 cups of dry (not including the dried fruit added after baking.

Your recipe has about 1/2 cup of fat and about 7 cups of dry solids so that's roughly the same proportion. It has 1 1/2 cups of liquid sweetening (counting the apple sauce as that). Some liquid would make the dry ingredients damp and sticky so they stick together but too much liquid makes means they aren't sticky enough?

In my recipe, the wet (including the fat) ingredients are mixed together in a saucepan while heating and then tossed with the dry - I don't know if the pre-heating makes a difference in clumping.

Anna's recipe has about the same ratio of fat and liquid sweet to dry as the recipe reinforcing the theory that the difference that causes non-clumping is too much liquid.

I can vouch for the recipe for "Clumpy Granola" - just made a batch this morning. Hubby broke one pan into man-size pieces, which is how he likes it for snacking. I spread this recipe onto two rimmed baking sheets with an off-set spatula, but it's one continuous bar and you break it into pieces after it's cooled. -Grainlady

I often substitute more oats, Grape Nuts Cereal, rice crispies and wheat germ for the nuts in granola recipes.

Thanks folks. I don't know how those strange marks with all the one halves came out in my initial post. The fat is one quarter cup (I started out with vegetable oil, but just this time tried coconut oil instead). The liquid sweetener did add up to one half cup or more (one quarter cup each of agave and maple syrup). I've tried it with & without a little applesauce & with and without a little honey. The dry ingredients do add up to approx. 7 and one quarter cups. I've been trying different variations for a couple months or so, and none of them have clumped enough - at first I did heat the liquid ingredients.
Cloud swift, although I didn't think it could be too much liquid, your post makes sense & the clumpy granola recipe is one quarter cup fat, one quarter cup liquid sweetener, 6 cups dry. So next time I make it, I will just use one quarter cup maple syrup and skip the agave. I'm still a bit confused in that it doesn't seem to me that only a half cup liquid total (oil & syrup) will coat 7 cups dry. So maybe I'll try 6 cups dry to make the same proportions as the clumpy granola recipe. Thanks again. I posted because someone on the recipe page for the clumpy granola wrote that they now know what makes it clump, and from re-reading it I couldn't tell what exactly that was!

Elba, often copying and pasting a recipe with the tiny fractions results in the funny squiggles. When I preview the messages, I delete the tiny fractions and manually type them in. e.g. 1/2. They come out properly.

Alternatively, you can go into your Options, tools and Encoding, and check off the Unicode UTF8. That will eliminate a lot of funny squiggles, etc.

Thanks, I'll definitely do that next time!