Savoury oat and seed bars

Healthy snack or a sweet treat?

Oat bars, cereal bars, flapjacks or any other way you call them are very nice but usually loaded with sugar. Even though it might not actually be white sugar but honey, or maple syrup or some kind of sweetener, still none of them are, let’s be honest, exactly healthy.

Oat bar manufacturers try their best to call them appealingly, Natural this or Superfood that, and give them names that evoke healthy lifestyle but the truth is there will still be tooth decay involved and a significant glucose spike.

How to avoid a glucose spike?

Monitoring blood sugar is essential for people living with diabetes or prediabetic. But even for perfectly healthy ones among us, frequent glucose spikes may cause imbalance within our blood cells and contribute to an onset of heart disease or atherosclerosis.

It doesn’t mean we should all suddenly go keto: it has not be found to be the healthiest of diets and anyway, we need sugar and carbs for energy and cell fuel. But how and when to treat ourselves to a little something, is the key. 

Savour the breakfast

Recent nutritional advice for avoiding the dreaded spikes is to steer clear of sugar in the morning. Which makes a lot of sense, not just for glucose spiking, but because the common shop-bought cereals, our usual breakfast fodder, are so full of sugar they should be served for dessert.

Wholemeal toast, eggs and beans are all good suggestions, but if we want to grab something on the go, we usually turn to those cereal bars full of sugar.

And that’s where my oat bars come to the fore: they are super delicious but savoury! With only a spoonful of honey in the batch, just to enhance the flavour, they are the perfect quick breakfast, energy snack or mid-morning sustenance that won’t cause glucose to surge through our bloodstream.

So delicious, so easy, so healthy

This recipe was inspired by the sweet breakfast dish I’ve been making for years, baked buttermilk oatmeal. Delicious as it is (and also adaptable to be cut into bars), I wanted to create a healthier i.e. savoury option.

And it’s a tremendous success if I say so myself. My test batches were disappearing even before they cooled, and I could never determine how long the bars kept because they wouldn’t last a day.

This is seriously good stuff: it’s high in protein with tonnes of fibre. It has low glycaemic index and it’s a slow burner. Friends with weight watching and best mates with your gut, also super easy to bake. And if you have any doubts as to the taste, I and all my tasters can assure you they are surprisingly delicious and rather moreish.

How to make the bars?

It’s best to mix all the liquid ingredients first before adding the oats and seeds. Peanut butter and honey should be stirred into the buttermilk so there are no lumps. Into that liquid oats and seeds/nuts go, mixed until it all clumps together. Add a little more buttermilk if it looks very dry.

This amount bakes best in a square brownie tin, 23 cm/ 9 inch or similar size. Lining it with parchment will help extract the bars. It is also practical to cut lines into the mix, marking individual bars. They can be cut after baking but won’t be as even.

Bake them until they look dry, crisp and slightly golden. They will start pulling away from the sides a little when ready, after about half an hour in the oven.

Variations

I like to add za’atar for the flavour as well as for the extra pinch of sesame it contains. But you can skip it, swap it for another spice blend like pumpkin spice, mixed spice, garam masala or ras el hanout, or individual spices of your choice.

Also honey can be optional especially if you want to keep the bars strictly vegan, and you can mix in a pinch of cinnamon instead. In that case you’ll also want to replace buttermilk with plant milk.

The seed and nut mix also leaves plenty of choice. Sunflower, pumpkin, sesame, flaxseed, chia, poppy seeds can all be used, and walnuts, hazelnuts, pistachios, pecans, peanuts and chunks of almonds instead of flakes in the nut department.

Buttermilk is light and binds the mix well, plus it’s low calorie. But if you prefer, use yoghurt or kefir.

And of course you can cut them larger or smaller than my recipe suggests. Or leave it whole, like a tablet, and break off pieces to munch on.

More oat recipes

Homemade granola, easy and healthy with just the fruit and seed mix you like, only waiting for milk, yoghurt or fresh fruit. Take back control of your breakfast!

Orange and ginger flavoured flapjack, soft and chewy, buttery and slightly sticky. Make it plain as it is, or add a handful of dried fruit or coconut flakes.

Summer fruit and oats bowl for breakfast, prepared ahead, effortlessly assembled every morning. Lightly roasted seasonal fruit compote topped with the simplest homemade granola is perfect for a healthy breakfast. 

More seed recipes

Corn ribs from the oven, with homemade dukkah, just like the ones served at Ottolenghi’s Rovi. It’s totally a snack du moment – and de toujours, I hope.

Roasted seed and nut mix, a perfect topping for salads, toasted in a warm oven. Salty and crunchy clusters of seeds and nuts are the best addition of fibre and essential nutrients to your diet.

Crunchy seed crackers made with a mix of 7 seeds; gluten free and keto-friendly if you skip millet grain. Great as a snack, broken over a salad for a topping or served on a cheese board.