Simple Healthy Buckwheat Oat Granola Bark with Nuts & Seeds

Make this quick and healthy buckwheat oat granola recipe for a delicious and satisfying real food breakfast – or snack with it’s bark-like clusters.

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Many of you who’ve read my weight loss story, bought the accompanying recipe eBooks, or participated in the Healthy Eating Facebook group know my deep and abiding love for my morning granola. I didn’t always feel that way – I went through many years trying to decide each morning what I “felt like” having: peanut butter and toast? Egg and toast? Some current boxed cereal? Muffin? Smoothie? Waffle? Etc.

You know what? I know now that making decisions about small, routine things like this every.single.day depletes my willpower – and starting first thing in the morning sets me up for decision fatigue later (yes, it’s most definitely a thing). As in, give-me-all-the-chocolate-at-8pm fatigue.

When I started a journey to eating whole foods and making what I could to be in control of the ingredients, zeroing in on foods I was happy to eat regularly became a major ‘trick’ in my bag towards a healthy weight. The side benefit? Reduced decision fatigue – i.e., stronger willpower.

While that may sound boring to some (I still reserve weekends for different breakfast foods to eat with my family!) the bowl of granola has morphed into a comfort food for me. I miss it when I’m not able to have it because of travel or other plans. I look forward to it in the mornings. Yep, even after years of eating ‘the same thing.’

I should explain that my bowl doesn’t hold only the granola – I keep adding more things that I hear are good for us to consume regularly. Each day my breakfast bowl now includes:

1/4 cup of granola
3/4 tablespoon each of: chia seeds, flaxseed meal, hemp seeds
4 walnut halves, broken up
about 2 tablespoons of dried cranberries
5-6 blackberries (frozen and thawed if not in season)

I use a small bowl and pour milk over it all. Brian has a similar bowl but usually eats his with yogurt. Guys, it’s SO good – really! And I am full all the way to lunch, though I do drink a cup of decaf coffee with milk (or tea with milk) which is another trick I use to not dive into more food.

Buckwheat Oat Granola Bark

Okay, now that you get the why, lets get to the what – this buckwheat oat granola bark recipe! This is a variation of my favorite healthy clumpy granola recipe that I have eaten for years after finding it (my even older recipe was good, but contained more sugar, oil, and an additional cooking step). I made it even healthier with the addition of buckwheat groats, less sweetener, less oil, and more nuts and seeds.

Really? Yes! Without sacrificing taste, consistency, or how quick and easy the original recipe has always been. When you make either of these granola recipes on a regular basis like I do, it will take you 5 minutes to stir together – seriously. It bakes for about 25 minutes and then cools for an hour before storing. There is very little hands-on time. And my family loves how both of these recipes create the clumpy bark-like pieces that make easy-to-grab snacks and the texture they add to morning cereal with milk (as in NOT soggy, yay!).

It’s making that “convenient” box of cereal sound a little less appealing, isn’t it?

So, you may be wondering – why mess with a great thing if you liked it? And what’s the big deal with buckwheat? As I was researching gut health and resistant starch, I came across numerous articles like this and this that show that buckwheat – especially in the form sold as ‘groats’ – is a prebiotic with resistant starch that feeds good gut bacteria. In fact, one study cited concluded:

Not only did the buckwheat-fed group emerge with a lower bodyweight when compared to the control, some of the best types of helpful bacteria were found, along with a decrease in some types of pathogenic bacteria.

How could I not figure out a way to add it to our diet regularly, right? As to why I further adapted a favorite recipe, well I’m always testing how low we can go with sweeteners! If it hadn’t held together as well or been as flavorful, I wouldn’t have kept the new honey and maple measurements, but both Brian and I agree, this buckwheat oat granola is just as good, so why not? And I added more seeds in the form of sesame, sunflower, and flax because they, too, have been shown to be super good for us to eat.

You can use either raw or toasted buckwheat groats in granola – both work. Some people feel the need to soak raw buckwheat for a few hours – do it if you want, but it’s not required (this whole soaking thing is a topic for another time, but I’ve read enough to know it’s not an exact science and seems to derive from a single source so not everyone agrees on the phytic acid issue).

I find Bob’s Red Mill to be a consistently good price for organic and I recently discovered Anthony’s though you have to commit to it since it’s a 5 lb. package (use their turmeric for our dog now).