Overnight oats are delicious and easy

I know, I know. Everyone and everything – every blogger, every “change your life” cookbook, every magazine with colourful photos of food on the cover – has something about overnight oats.

I don’t use Instagram any more but I’m pretty sure if they banned posts about overnight oats, there’d be a power surge at Facebook data centres as hordes of suddenly-idle electrons all compete to power Kylie Jenner’s Beyoncé cosplay efforts at once.

Seriously though: overnight oats are delicious, easy, healthy, affordable, and I actually enjoy eating them in the morning. There aren’t that many foods which tick all of those boxes.

To assemble the oats, I drop the ingredients into a half-gallon Bernadin wide-mouth mason jar, and shake to combine. Then I put it in the fridge. When I want to eat some, I pour the oats into a bowl, and add some fruit or whatever.

A lot of recipes I love are somewhat fiddly or involve quite a lot of active time, but a work-week of overnight oats breakfasts takes less than five minutes to prepare start to finish. That’s it that’s all.

Overnight Oats

5 ingredients in a jar in the fridge: delicious and healthy
Course Breakfast
Cuisine American
Prep Time 5 minutes
Resting time 12 hours
Servings 8
Calories 285kcal
Author Adam Barnett

Equipment

  • 1 Half gallon widemouth mason jar Or any large enough container with a lid
  • 1 Measuring jug or cup measures Or just eyeball it. You'll be fine.

Ingredients

  • 3 cup Rolled oats
  • 3 cup 2% milk Plant-based milk probably fine too, although I didn't test it yet
  • 1.5 cup Plain Greek yoghurt I use 5%
  • 1/3 cup Chia seeds These the finished product a pudding-y gel texture, as well as providing some textural variation
  • 3 tbsp Maple syrup You could leave this out but that's your loss

Instructions

  • Put all the ingredients into the mason jar, milk first to avoid clumping at the bottom.
    Overnight oats ingredients in a mason jar, not yet mixed.
  • Shake the jar vigorously to combine the ingredients.
    A large mason jar containing overnight oats. The background of the photo is a garden.
  • Put the jar in the fridge.

Notes

Usually I prefer weighing ingredients. Even if it’s slightly more work, the results are more precise and reproducible. In this case, however, there’s no need to bust out the scales; the ingredient ratios don’t matter exactly, and this keeps things as quick and easy as possible. This is barely more work than making a bowl of cereal.

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