Fear of Missing Oat

There’s more to oatmeal than milk and brown sugar

As a kid born in the 1970s, it almost goes without saying that I ate a lot of cold breakfast cereal.  Not the “good kind” with glossy sugar glaze and questionable food dyes, but the “healthy” stuff.  Nutrition labels were scrutinized for grams of sugar, ostensibly to protect my teeth.

There were occasional attempts to cajole me into eating “porridge”, a bland squishy word that does the concoction no favours at all.  Porridge is good for you.  You just know that it is.  The blandness was somewhat of a blessing, I suppose, but the addition of cold milk and brown sugar inevitably rendered the thing a congealed, runny, gritty blob.  The grimness of the experience was enhanced by the scowls of my parents who had stood stirring a pot on the stove and were less than pleased to realize that most of the bowl was headed for the bin. 

Feeding a miserable child a bowl of gruel just doesn’t work.

That said, I am now comfortably ensconced in my mid-40s and terms like “soluble fibre” and “colonoscopy” are part of my vocabulary. Oatmeal seems like a good idea.  It feels virtuous. 

At some point I did get over much of my hatred of oatmeal, and it was by the realization that it didn’t have to be gross. Grains, I learned, were more than just wheat, rice, and oats, and if you count the many varieties and styles, even a fairly basic grocery store has at least a dozen options.  Better yet, there’s more than one way to prepare them. In all the ways that matter, grains are a blank slate.  They can be whatever you want them to be.

Enter savoury oatmeal.  In particular, steel cut oatmeal.

Figuring out that I could treat oatmeal like any other grain was a game changer.  A bowl of savoury oatmeal topped with vegetables, a poached egg, hot sauce, etc. is a breakfast equivalent of mashed potatoes:  savoury, spoonable, and perfect for when it’s howling cold and the snow is making squeaky noises. 

Steel cut oats solve the texture problem to some extent. They don’t dissolve into a miserable lump of slop better suited to paper mâché crafts. But the downside is that they take a while to cook (at least 20 minutes) and a fair bit of stirring to keep them from scorching.

On some level I am fundamentally lazy and the thought of standing in front of the stove in the morning is a nope.  The microwave?  Still takes a long time and I have no intention of figuring out the wattage and all the various buttons and settings.

Thankfully, there’s a trick to making a batch of steel cut oats without worrying about stirring and scorched pots.  Better yet, you can customize it to your exact liking and makes it as virtuous as you please. 

Let’s start with the oats.

Whole oats, or groats (a fun word) are the whole kernel after the husk has been removed.  Steel cut oats are groats that have been chopped into pieces.  Rolled oats are groats that have been steamed and flattened. Quick cook oats are just smaller and thinner rolled oats, and instant are so small and thin they are pretty much dust, hence the gluey texture of those instant oatmeal packets. Eww.

So, what if you could make steel cut oats without fuss? And what if they could help you get even more servings of vegetables? And leave memories of tasteless mush behind? Sold yet?

You’ll need a pot with a tight fitting lid, a spoon, a measuring cup, and your stove (of course). Ingredients? 1 cup/165 g of steel cut oats, some water, a pinch of salt and, if you want to jump on the extra healthy bandwagon, a couple of small zucchini and a box grater.

1. In your pot bring 4 cups of water to a boil. Add a pinch of salt. If you are using zucchini, reduce the water to 3 cups.

2. Grate your zucchini, if using, on the large holes of your box grater. It will look like a lot, but trust me, it cooks down a lot.

   

3. Once your water reaches a boil, add your oats, stir, and set a timer for about 90 seconds.

4. After 90 seconds, add your grated zucchini, give it another stir, and let it cook another 90 seconds.

   

5. After those 90 seconds, turn off the burner and slam a lid on it.

6. Come back in about an hour and you’ll have perfectly cooked steel cut oats.

   

You know how zucchini bread doesn’t really taste like zucchini? Well, it’s kind of the same here. The zucchini add a mild vegetable flavour, but it mostly disappears when you add toppings of your choice.

Oh the toppings you can add! Today I added some spinach (thawed and squeezed a frozen brick), a poached egg, some sesame seeds, and one of my favourite pandemic food discoveries: chili crisp.

But you could add beans, tofu, veggies of all descriptions, kimchi, avocado, salsa, or anything else you have in the fridge. You could cook the oats with broth or stock instead of water. You could sauté some onions and garlic in the pot before you get started. Go wild with spices like turmeric, coriander, and cumin. To the horror of my seven year old I sometimes add anchovies or sardines! I get some weird looks at the breakfast table.

But think of it this way: one cup of uncooked steel cut oats yields four servings. That’s almost all your weekday breakfasts prepped in one go. They keep fine in the fridge for a few days can be frozen perfectly well. You get the stomach-satisfying benefits of added veggie volume, and can customize them to your heart’s desire with whatever have on hand. And even though it’s pretty awesome to get 2 or 3 servings of veggies before your morning coffee kicks in, who’s to say you can’t have oats at lunch and dinner too?

So forget what you thought you knew about oats and try something new. Breakfast need not be a “grueling” ordeal.

(Ok, ok…. I’ll show myself oat.)