Sweet Potato Oat Bars

These sweet potato bars made with oats are the perfect healthy snack. Add your favorite mix-ins like dried fruit, nuts or even chocolate chips.

Back in October I got way into meal prep.

Having never really embraced the whole process of spending an entire day (or even half a day) on the weekend making food for us throughout the week before, my interest in it kind of took me by surprise.

It coincided with me getting back into tracking macros a bit more stringently though and if you’ve ever taken that approach to food, you know it really is a heck of a lot easier when you have things prepped.

Now that it’s about 3 months later and I’m still going strong with the whole meal prep thing, I can say that I think it’s mainly because I’m not always, in fact, I’m mostly not making recipes.

Instead, I’m prepping ingredients.

Doing things like roasted a batch of vegetables, preparing a couple of starches (like rice or roasted squash) and cooking 1-2 pounds of ground meat.

I’m washing fruit and lettuce and chopping vegetables for snacks. That approach has made all the difference for me.

The one area I do make a recipe each week is in the form of a baked good, like these sweet potato bars. 

I love having a baked good like these sweet potato oat bars on hand for afternoon snacks. 

Snack bars like these high protein cinnamon cake bars, pumpkin chocolate chip bars (or their more traditional alternative – gluten-free pumpkin bars) and this strawberry yogurt chocolate chip snack cake have been long time favorites but sometimes it’s fun to switch things up!

Sweet potato bars are what I’ve been grabbing lately around 3pm when the post-lunch munchies kicks in or when I need something to get me through a pre-dinner workout.

I absolutely love the macro breakdown on this recipe because they’re surprisingly on the lower-end for carbs.

At 4.5g protein, just under 15g carbs and 3.3g fat, they’re a great bang for your macro buck. 

How Do You Make Sweet Potato Bars?

The best part about this recipe is how easy everything comes together because it’s done in the food processor!

You literally add every ingredient (except your add-ins – shown here with dried cranberries) to the food processor and process until smooth.

It’s just like my baked chocolate oats recipe except that is prepped entirely in the blender.

Fold in your add-ins then pour into a greased baking dish and bake. That’s it!

These sweet potato oat bars rely on two main ingredients:

• oat flour
• cooked sweet potato 

If you don’t have oat flour on hand, don’t worry because you can easily make your own!

Add normal rolled oats to your food processor or high speed blender (I use my Vitamix all the time for this) and processor until a fine flour results. It’s that simple.

Try these healthier zucchini bars – they’re oat based too and even if you skip the lightened up cream cheese frosting, they’re so delicious!

Often times, I’ll cook the sweet potato (I usually just bake in the oven when I’m meal prepping something else) in advance and then let it cool completely and freeze the cooked flesh in a freezer bag.

You can use leftover cooked sweet potato in soups, stews, chili and other baked goods like sweet potato cookies or a sweet potato biscuit recipe in the future.

I do this with carrots, lentils and bananas that have over-ripened on the counter too because those are all ingredients I use frequently for baked snack goods and it’s so easy to just have them ready to go when I’m ready to bake.

What Can I Add To My Sweet Potato Bars?

Oh, girl (or guy – although y’all are in the minority readers on this site) the possibilities are endless for add-ins!

As you can see, I went with dried cranberries this time around. ‘Tis the season and all, right?

But you can use any dried fruit you’d like.

Raisins would be a great complement to the sweet potato, dried tart cherries (although, maybe you want to make these chewy tart cherry oat bars instead then?) or, dried blueberries even.

Of course, you could go all out and venture towards the dessert side with some chocolate chips!

Try these chocolate chip chickpea blondies if you’re craving chocolate though, they’re SO rich and fudgy!

You could even do unsweetened coconut flakes (I’ve done that one before) or cacao nibs if you want to be a little more hipster.

It’s a flexible recipe, I just recommend keeping the add-in amount similar to what is stated in the recipe so that texture remains about the same.

The other substitution you can make is actually swapping out the sweet potato for cooked carrots.

I guess they wouldn’t really be sweet potato bars any more then but I’ve done it and it works and if you’re looking to make these even lower-carb than they already are, carrots are a great option.

100g of sweet potato has 20g of carbohydrates while carrots have half that at 10g of carbohydrates.

How Do I Store Sweet Potato Bars?

Chances are whether you’re meal prepping these bars for the week or not, you’re likely not going to eat all 12 servings in a day so storing them becomes a valid question.

I’ll leave these out on the counter for the first day. After that, I put them in an air-tight tupperware container and keep them in the fridge. Much like these sweet potato bran muffins, these can also be stored in the freezer for 1-2 months.

If your house is anything like mine, they won’t last much more than a few days anyway!

More Sweet Potato Snacks:

whole wheat sweet potato banana muffins
sweet potato chocolate chip cookies 
sweet potato raisin bread

I also love these pumpkin apple olive oil muffins that you could easily swap out pumpkin for sweet potato and these sweet potato and fig muffins.