Breakfast Bars Recipe

Breakfast bars are great for a meal on the go or an afternoon snack, but while it’s tempting to buy a store-bought bar, they’re often too sweet, aggressively spiced, and either so chewy they stick to the palate or dangerously tough with jagged edges that cut the tongue. To avoid this, we encourage you to take the time (mostly hands-off) to make your own at home with our easy recipe for homemade breakfast bars that are lightly sweetened, full of flavor, and have just the right texture.

Our perfect bar is hearty with a crunchy exterior that gives way to a softer, chewier center. It’s well-seasoned, with just a touch of caramelized sweetness and a kaleidoscope of dried fruit, toasted oats, and crunchy seeds, and it requires little more than tossing everything together, pressing it into the pan, and refrigerating until firm. To achieve this great result, we asked our test kitchen colleague Renu Dhar to methodically prepare batch after batch of seed-filled bars to create healthy and satisfying breakfast bars.

Tips for Homemade Breakfast Bars

Toast the oatmeal. We found that toasting the oats with a little oil, brown sugar, and honey before mixing them with the other ingredients really deepened the final flavor of the bar. The oil, brown sugar and honey lightly caramelize the outside of the oats to create a rich butterscotch flavor. This only requires 30 minutes of hands-off cooking and cooling time, which can be done while you prepare the other ingredients.

Use a blend of sweeteners. To give the bars a nuanced, light sweetness without overpowering the earthy seeds, the bars are sweetened with a combination of brown sugar, honey and finely chopped dates. The sticky honey and dates not only provide sweetness, but also help the bars hold together. A swirl of your favorite sweet fruit preserves stirred into the oat mixture before pressing it into the pan further sweetens the bars and adds another dimension of flavor. We love them with cherry jams, but raspberry, strawberry, or blueberry all work wonderfully.

Add a variety of seeds. Chia seeds, hemp seeds, and sunflower seeds have various health benefits, but they also bring a variety of crunchy textures and savory nutty flavors to the party.

Bind it all together with nut or seed butter. . A creamy nut or seed butter of your choice not only gives you the opportunity to further customize these bars with your favorite flavor profile, but it’s also the key sticky ingredient to bind the ingredients together. Feel free to use peanut butter, almond butter, cashew butter, or sunflower butter. The latter is a great choice if you need to avoid nuts or peanuts due to allergies.

August 2024