Overnight Oats
Rolled oats, not instant, and one part oats to one part liquid by volume. They soften by soaking rather than cooking, so the ratio is nothing like porridge.
- Prep
- 10 min
- Resting
- 8 hr
- Total
- 8 hr 10 min
- Serves
- 2
- Revisions
- 1
Allergens
- Cereals containing gluten
- Milk
Named from the ingredients as written, including those carried in from sub-recipes. This is not a guarantee — check the labels on what you actually buy, and note that a product’s recipe can change.
Ingredients
Serves
Oats
To serve
Method
Oats
Stir the oats, milk, yogurt, chia seeds, syrup, salt and vanilla together in a jar or bowl.
Use rolled oats rather than instant. Instant oats are pre-cooked and cut small, so they dissolve overnight into a paste; jumbo oats are too thick and stay chalky in the middle. Standard rolled porridge oats are the only ones that soften properly without collapsing.
The liquid is roughly one part oats to two parts liquid by weight, counting the yogurt — which is far less than porridge takes, because nothing is evaporating.
Do not skip the salt. A quarter teaspoon in a bowl of oats is the difference between something that tastes of cereal and something that tastes of nothing, and it is the most commonly omitted ingredient in the whole dish.
Cover and refrigerate for at least 6 hours and up to 3 days.
To serve
Stir before eating — the chia seeds will have set the top layer firmer than the bottom.
Loosen with a splash more milk if it has set too thickly, which it will after two days.
Top with fruit and toasted nuts at the moment of eating rather than the night before, so they stay bright and crunchy.
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What to expect
- Taste
Mild, creamy and faintly sweet, with the salt doing far more than its quantity suggests. The vanilla is what makes it taste deliberate rather than plain.
- Aroma
Very little. Vanilla and dairy.
- Texture
Soft and thick with individual oats still discernible, against the crunch of the nuts and the softness of the fruit. Uniform texture is the failure mode.
- Sound
None.
- How the flavour moves
Cream and salt first, then the sweetness, then the fruit. Short and mild.
- Serve it
Cold from the fridge, which is the point in summer and the drawback in winter.
- Goes with
Coffee. Nothing else needed.
Cook's notes
- Difficulty
Beginner.
- Cost
Very low.
- Equipment
Two jars or a bowl.
- When to make it
The night before a working week.
- Best season
None, though it suits summer better than midwinter.
- You know it is done when
The oats should have swelled and the mixture thickened enough to hold a spoon mark. Chia seeds will have formed a visible gel.
- And it feels like
Soft with a little chew left in the oat. Uniformly smooth means instant oats were used.
- Food safety
Nothing unusual. It lives in the fridge and stays there.
- Where it goes wrong
- Instant oats, which turn to paste.
- No salt, which is why most overnight oats taste of nothing.
- Too much liquid, using porridge ratios in a dish where nothing evaporates.
- Adding the fruit and nuts the night before, so the fruit bleeds and the nuts go soft.
- Eating it fridge-cold in January, when it is genuinely unpleasant.
- If it does go wrong
Watery: too much liquid, or no chia; stir in a tablespoon of chia and give it an hour. Solid: it has been in three days; loosen with milk. Bland: salt, then more vanilla, then more sweetener in that order.
- Making it ahead
It is nothing but make-ahead. Three days at a time is the sensible batch.
- Keeping it
Three days in the fridge, which makes it worth making a larger batch on a Sunday.
- Reheating
It can be eaten warm, gently heated, which is closer to porridge and perfectly good.
- Freezing
No.
- Leftovers
It is designed as leftovers.
- Scaling it
Linear, and worth making four jars at once.
- Substitutions
Any milk works; oat and soya both thicken more than dairy, so use a little extra. Yogurt can be omitted, in which case use 250ml of milk and expect something looser.
- Dietary swaps
Contains gluten — oats are naturally gluten free but are almost always contaminated in milling, so anyone coeliac needs oats specifically labelled gluten free. Contains milk. Vegan with a plant milk, plant yogurt and maple syrup. Egg free and nut free unless nuts are added.
- Shopping for it
Anyone coeliac needs oats explicitly labelled gluten free — the grain is naturally free of it and mills are almost never dedicated.
- Keeping the cost down
Among the cheapest breakfasts there is. Frozen berries cost a fraction of fresh and are better in this than out-of-season fresh ones.
- Sustainability
Oats are one of the lowest-impact staples there is and grow well in Britain and Ireland, so they travel very little. The dairy is the heaviest part, and this is a dish where plant milks work genuinely well rather than as a compromise — oat milk in particular, which is the same crop again. Frozen fruit is usually both cheaper and lower-impact than fresh out of season, and it wastes nothing.
- Nutrition
Good fibre from the oats and chia, protein from the yogurt. Genuinely a sound breakfast, unlike a great many things marketed as one.
- Worth it?
Rolled oats and a quarter teaspoon of salt. Two decisions and the dish stops being wallpaper paste.
Where it comes from
- Origin
Switzerland, around 1900, in a different form.
- Also called
Bircher muesli, for the ancestor.
- Said out loud
BEER-cher MYOOZ-lee.
- What the name means
Muesli is a Swiss German diminutive of Mus, meaning purée or mush. Bircher is the doctor's name.
- History
Maximilian Bircher-Benner ran a sanatorium in Zurich and devised the dish around 1900 as part of a raw-food regime for his patients — the original was mostly grated apple with a small amount of soaked oats, nuts and condensed milk, and it was served as a starter rather than a breakfast. The modern version has inverted those proportions and moved the meal. Overnight oats as a named thing, in a jar, belongs to the 2010s and to social media.
- Why it matters
Modest, but it is one of the very few dishes whose spread can be traced almost entirely to photographs of it in jars.
- When it is eaten
Weekday breakfast, and specifically a breakfast for people who do not want to make one.
- The traditional way
Soaking raw oats rather than cooking them.
- How it changed
The apple mostly disappeared, yogurt arrived, and the proportion of oats went up several times over.
- Regional variations
Bircher muesli proper, with grated apple, is still made in Switzerland and Germany and is a better dish than most overnight oats.
- How this version differs
It insists on the salt, which is the most commonly omitted ingredient in the dish and the one that makes the largest difference.
- Sources and credit
Maximilian Bircher-Benner for the ancestor.
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