Gluten free, vegan peanut butter oat bars are great for breakfast or an afternoon snack. Filled with nuts, oats, and chocolate and topped with flaky salt, they are endlessly adaptable, healthy, and use ingredients you probably already have in your pantry.

I’m very picky when it comes to bakeries. A lot of American bakeries rely on sugar alone as flavor and, due to the volume of production, most treats are mediocre at best. That being said, there are a few bakeries who produce exceptional breads, pastries, and treats. They focus on quality over quantity and charge appropriately for their labor, allowing them to invest in skilled bakers and high-quality ingredients. Stopping by one of these rare bakery gems is an absolute delight. One of my very favorite bakeries is Wild Love Bakehouse in Knoxville, Tennessee. It’s a small cafe where natural light streams through the floor to ceiling windows, where you can watch the bakers knead and laminate dough through glass walls, where people gather at picnic tables watching kids run up and down the grassy lawn, where the coffee is always perfect and the croissants are always flaky. It’s a community spot through and through.

All summer, we would spend mornings before work or days off huddled around those picnic tables, drinking iced coffees and littering the table with croissant crumbs and Wild Love quickly became one of the friends I would miss upon my return to Florida. Everything that they make is great, from the chocolate croissants to the sausage biscuits, but it was their peanut butter oat bar that surprisingly stole the show. The peanut butter oat bar is the only gluten free baked good offered, so they sell out fast. They are thick squares, double the size of a brownie. Oats, nuts, and chocolate chips are bound together by peanut butter to create a cookie-like protein bar that will keep you full until lunch. And, of course, the tops are littered with a smattering of flaky salt, which you know if you’ve been around this blog for any amount of time is the fastest way to my heart.

making homemade granola bars

When I came back home to Florida and could no longer drive 3 minutes down the street for my peanut butter bar fix, I started working on my own. These can pass as breakfast or dessert, or both and will keep in the fridge for the whole week. If you are trying to stay away from refined sugars, try substituting coconut sugar for brown sugar. Feel free to make them your own, using whatever mix-ins you’d like, but make sure you don’t forget the salt! To make them vegan, just make sure to use vegan chocolate chips!