Breakfast bars are great for a meal on the run or an afternoon nibble, but while it’s tempting to reach for a store-bought bar, they’re often too sweet, aggressively spiced, and either so chewy they stick to the roof of your mouth, or dangerously hard with jagged edges that cut into your tongue. To avoid this, we encourage you to take the (mostly hands-off) time to make your own at home with our easy recipe for homemade breakfast bars that are lightly sweet, 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 fruits, toasted oats, and crunchy seeds, plus it requires little more than tossing everything together, pressing into the pan, and refrigerating until firm. To get to this great result, we asked our test kitchen colleague Renu Dhar to methodically make batch after batch of seed-filled bars to come up with wholesome and satisfying breakfast bars.

Tips for Homemade Breakfast bars

Toast the oats. We found that toasting the oats with a little oil, brown sugar, and honey before mixing them with the other ingredients really deepened the bar’s final flavor. The oil, brown sugar, and honey lightly caramelize the exterior of the oats to create a rich butterscotch flavor. It requires just 30 minutes of hands-off baking and cooling time, which can be done while you are preparing 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 preferred sweet fruit preserves folded into the oat mixture before pressing it into the pan further sweetens the bars and adds another flavor dimension. We love them with cherry preserves, but raspberry, strawberry, or blueberry all work wonderfully. 

Add a variety of seeds. Chia seeds, hemp seeds, and sunflower kernels boast various health benefits, but 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 a chance to further customize these bars with your preferred flavor profile, it’s also the key sticky ingredient for binding 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 tree nuts or peanuts because of allergies.