Coffee overnight oats bring together two of my favorite things — coffee and overnight oats! Old-fashioned oats and chia seeds are soaked overnight in a combination of coffee, almond milk, maple syrup, and vanilla extract to make your next morning’s breakfast easy and SUPER delicious. 

I top these creamy coffee overnight oats with a yummy salted date caramel topping for a sweet, slightly salty, and extra caramel-y touch. It’s phenomenal!

Why I Love This Recipe

• Great for meal prep! Aka you can enjoy a delicious breakfast every day of the week. Just combine your ingredients, soak overnight, make your date caramel, drizzle it on, and dig in.
• A rich source of protein, fiber — and caffeine!
• Can be served hot or cold. I love my overnight oats cold, but there’s no reason why you can’t warm these oats up to make a coffee oatmeal. Yum!

Ingredients You’ll Need

• Rolled oats: Also known as old-fashioned oats, they’re less processed than quick oats and hold up well when being soaked overnight. That being said, quick-cooking oats are a great substitute if you don’t have rolled oats on hand.
• Chia seeds: Chia seeds are packed with nutrients and absorb liquid to create a gel-like consistency when soaked. 
• Almond milk: This dairy-free milk provides a perfect creamy texture for your overnight oatmeal. Any variety of milk will work for this recipe, so choose your own adventure here. You can even make your own oat milk using my tutorial .
• Cold brew: I like using a strong cold brew coffee. You can also use espresso or normal brewed coffee depending on how strong of a coffee flavor you prefer.
• Maple syrup: Pure maple syrup adds a natural sweetness that tastes so yummy with the coffee flavor. If you’d rather not use maple syrup, though, honey is also a great option you can use for a natural sweetener.
• Medjool dates: Be sure to get pitted dates. The softer, the better! Dates add a delicious natural sweetness and smooth texture to your date caramel sauce. Don’t want to hassle with the date caramel? Top these coffee overnight oats with chopped dates and sea salt for a similar taste to the date caramel.

Find the list of full ingredients in the recipe card below.

Get Out the Food Processor

I use our food processor to blend up the date caramel sauce. If you don’t have one, a high-speed blender will work, too!

My Expert Tips for Serving These Overnight Oats

I love trying out different variations of these coffee overnight oats by adding other tasty toppings each time I make them (which is often). Try out any of your favorite toppings that sound good to you! Some of my favorites include:

• Fresh fruit: Anything goes here. Fresh raspberries, strawberries, bananas, and blueberries all work well with the coffee flavor.
• Cacao nibs or chocolate chips: Sprinkle on top for some extra crunch and a chocolate-y touch.
• Nuts: Chopped almonds, walnuts, or pecans would be delicious.
• Protein powder: Add a scoop of your favorite protein powder to the overnight oats before soaking them overnight.
• Seeds: Add some extra texture and nutrients with pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, or hemp seeds. 
• Yogurt: Top your overnight oats with a dollop of Greek or vanilla yogurt for some added creaminess and protein. 

When it comes to sides, you’ll absolutely be obsessed (and caffeinated) if you pair these oats with my Vanilla Sweet Cream Cold Brew or this DIY Maple Pecan Latte.

For something savory, my Egg and Arugula Toast, Bacon Egg Cups, or Cheesy Sous Vide Egg Bites are all the rage.

Place your cold brew overnight oats in an airtight container and store in the refrigerator for up to 3-4 days.

This recipe can easily be doubled or tripled to make multiple servings for the week ahead. I like storing mine in individual servings so I can just grab and go in the morning!

For years I lived with the mistaken assumption that Starbucks’ original pumpkin spice latte was made with actual pumpkin. I had never tasted the stuff, but it just seemed logical it would. So I was scandalized when a friend eventually corrected me. “You mean they call it pumpkin spice latte and there’s not a drop of pumpkin?” I demanded. “Yeah,” the friend said. “It’s just the spice.”

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one this didn’t sit well with, since Starbucks changed their recipe several years ago to include some pumpkin puree—number three in their “pumpkin spice sauce” ingredient list after sugar and condensed skim milk…not the ratios I personally would want to see. But by then I’d started making my own. Not often, maybe once a year, I’d simmer real pumpkin in the form of butternut or red kuri squash with milk and spices, blend it into a thickened, frothy cream, and drink that for a treat. The combination of roasty coffee with earthy-sweet squash and warm fall spices is so good, it’s almost comical Starbucks managed to invent this drink and miss the best part.

About the Starbucks version, though: It’s not fair for me to malign their drink without ever actually trying it, so I very recently did, and I have to cut them some slack. It’s pretty tasty, and I can see why it has become so popular. It’s sweeter than I would prefer, but it’s not aggressively so, and the spices are dialed in to taste exactly like they should for a product like this, which is basically the edible version of the scented candle version of the edible version.

I’m not likely to become a regular drinker of either Starbucks or my own recipe—they’re both a once-in-a-while kind of thing—but I think there’s space in the world for both. Theirs is exactly what most of you already know it to be, mine is more like a not-too-sweet, not-too-thick pumpkin pie in a cup (with coffee). Mine also has some distinct advantages I want to point out.

The Key to My Creamy, Frothy PSL

One of the advantages of having never tried the real Starbucks PSL until after I’d developed my own recipe is that I was uninfluenced by any preexisting idea of what it was supposed to be. I didn’t realize that Starbucks makes something that’s more like a pumpkin-tinged, spiced syrup to add to a cup of milky coffee and then top with whipped cream.

So when I set out to make my own, I took a completely different path that solves a lot of technical issues while getting you much closer to a real steamed-milk, espresso-based drink. To make mine, instead of a syrup, I simmer cubes of butternut or red kuri squash (butternut squash is usually the “pumpkin” in a can of pumpkin puree) in milk with a little sweetener (either maple syrup or sugar) and the warm, autumnal spices that go into pumpkin pie recipes.

Once tender, I blend this mixture up until smooth and frothy; a high-speed blender does this best, creating the smoothest, frothiest pumpkin-spice cream, but an immersion blender works too. The beauty of it is that the fiber from the squash, once blended, lightly thickens the milk, making it seem richer and creamer. At the same time, that added fiber helps the milk trap and retain more air bubbles from the blending, giving it a frothy texture that is remarkably similar to milk that’s been steamed to a dense foam—expensive espresso equipment not required.

Poured on top of a dose of coffee, which honestly can be anything from a shot of espresso to some strongly brewed coffee or even regular brewed coffee for a lighter coffee flavor, the effect says “latte” a lot more than the Starbucks version I’ve tasted does. It’s also much easier than making a pumpkin-spice syrup, which seems to be the move many other recipes make in an attempt to create their own homemade versions of a PSL. Plus, it achieves more of the goals of this type of drink with less work.

The result? A PSL that puts the P first.

August 2023

Cook Mode
(Keep screen awake)

• 1 pound (454 g) roughly diced, peeled butternut or red kuri squash (about 1/2 a 2-pound squash)

• 1 quart (946 ml) whole milk

• 1 cinnamon stick

• 1 whole star anise

• 1 teaspoon ground ginger

• 6 cloves

• 2 cardamom pods

• 1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

• 1/4 cup maple syrup or granulated sugar

• Pinch salt

• Shots of espresso or strong coffee, for serving

1. In a large saucepan, stir together squash, milk, cinnamon, star anise, ground ginger, cloves, cardamom, nutmeg, maple syrup (or sugar), and salt; if desired, prepare a spice sachet of cheesecloth or in a tea strainer to make removal of whole spices easier. Set over medium heat and bring to a simmer, then lower heat to maintain a bare simmer and cook, stirring and scraping frequently, until squash is very soft, abou 30 minutes.

2. Remove and discard whole spices. Transfer to a blender jar, or use an immersion blender to blend directly in the saucepan, and blend, starting and low speed and increasing to high speed, until squash is fully pureed and a thick, frothy liquid has formed.

3. For each serving of coffee, pour a shot of espresso or strong coffee (roughly 1 fluid ounce; 30ml) into a mug. Add 6 to 8 fluid ounces (175-235ml) hot spiced pumpkin cream on top and serve. Garnish with a pinch of ground spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, etc.), if desired.

Make Ahead and Storage

The pumpkin cream can be refrigerated for up to 5 days. Reheat in a small saucepan, frothing in a blender again if needed before serving.