Playing with Oatmeal
Chances are, when you think of oatmeal, you think of instant oatmeal. Tear open a packet, add hot water, and you’re set. It’s not bad, it’s easy, and relatively good for you. However, there’s a few options popping up at most grocery stores that let you play around with oatmeal a bit more than just straight instant oatmeal.
Steel Cut Oats
On the spectrum of oatmeal choices, steel cut oats are on the far left of the unprocessed scale, whereas instant oatmeal is as far as you can process the oats without making them a powder. Because they’re not squished down, they have a lot of flavor, but require a lot of cooking.
We like them a whole bunch, but the 15-20 minutes of cooking time make them a hard choice during the week. You can put them in the slow cooker overnight, but we don’t typically plan that far in advance. In our book, steel cut is a weekend treat.
Scottish / Irish Oatmeal
Easy to make, lots of flavor.
Scottish / Irish oats (really, no difference that we can see, clearly the whole Irish / Scottish thing is a marketing gimmick) are slightly more processed than steel cut but significantly less processed than instant. They take about three minutes to make, and have lots of flavor. The formula is straightforward, use one part oats to three parts water, microwave for three minutes. The multiple threes make it easy to make them on auto pilot at 5:45 in the morning when Wilbur wakes up.
Great, I have a bowl of plain oats, now what?
One thing instant oats have going for them is lots of crazy flavors. You don’t have to think much about adding stuff, because they’re already pretty sugared and mapled. With the less processed varieties, the flavor is your burden (and joy) to bear. Here’s a few options we’ve tried that work out great:
- dried fruit
- chopped apples
- sliced bananas
- milk and honey
- brown sugar
- nuts
- any combination of the above
- and, the most controversial, (our favorite): peanut butter
“Peanut butter? In oatmeal? Are you crazy?” Yep. It’s awesome. Our friend Erica Burns’ grandfather clued us in by way of Erica, and we never looked back. It’s our favorite oatmeal additive. If we owned Quaker, we’d release it as a flavor and clean house. The world is ready for peanut butter flavored oatmeal, get on board while it’s still hip and underground.
PB Oatmeal, not much to look at, but it's delicious.
Mmm, the wife and I love steel cut oatmeal on a Sunday morning, and we’ve tried all of the above ingredients (sans p.b., but we’ll definitely try it now!). Lots of soluble fiber, rich, nutty flavor, sticks to your ribs: what’s not to like?
One thing we like is if we are using bananas, cut one up and put it in at the *start* of the cooking process: this seems to break down the starches of the fruit and provides a subtle sweetness throughout the meal.
Another idea is a dash of cinnamon, cardamom, and other spices. Michelle’s fond of star anise. Judicious use, though, just a touch.
Hmm, what else: oh, lightly toasting pecans or walnuts in a pan over low heat before chopping coarsely and adding at the end of cooking.
Oatmeal is great! It’s not just for Wilford Brimley anymore.
I buy vanilla beans at Costco and keep’em in the fridge, so when I make oatmeal, I split a half a vanilla bean, scrape the pods into the milk while it’s heating and dump in the bean for good measure–you can always fish it out later. It’s a wonderful addition to the oatmeal.
At a restaurant I worked at, we also used to brulee oatmeal. Put it into a bowl, top with sugar–the turbinado sugar works best, and then hit it with a torch just like you would creme brulee. You need a bit thicker of a coating of sugar to make sure the oatmeal doesn’t burn.
Oh peanut butter oatmeal… where have you been? You have singlehandedly saved all the plain oatmeal in my house from getting pulverized to make a bath additive. The peanut-butter-loving children will rejoice this weekend!!
Glad the PB Oatmeal is a hit. We usually spread it out on a plate for Wilbur. Once it cools a bit, he makes little oatmeal balls out of it. He eats most of them, some get thrown.