Cooking techniques, recipes, recommendations and cooking equipment
How to Make Perfect Steel-Cut Oats
Steel-Cut oats are amazingly good—delicious and nutritious—but they're kind of a pain to cook because they're so hard and require so much simmering. It can take up to 30 minutes to cook them on the stove top and you have to stir constantly to make sure they don't boil over or stick to the pan. I tried doing them in a rice maker and in the microwave, neither of which turned out well. Then I tried the slow cooker and found that this is the perfect way to make steel-cut oats exactly right every time with hardly any effort.
Ingredients
Steel-cut oats
Water (4-to-1 water-to-oats ratio)
Salt (¼ teaspoon for each ¼ c. oats)
Pure maple syrup to taste
Butter to taste
Instructions
Just put all the ingredients in the slow cooker and cook on 200 degrees Fahrenheit for about 4 hours. The water and oats should be combined in a 4 to 1 ratio. When I make this using American measurements, I used 1 Cup water for each ¼ cup of oats. In the metric system this is about 240 ml water for each 40 grams of oats.
Comment #1 posted on 2016-03-03 18:18:23 by Dave Morriss
Interesting episode
I enjoy porridge, or porage, as it's called here. I'd noticed your episode in the queue a week or two back and went looking for 'pinhead oatmeal' the Scottish name for these oats. My first try at cooking them on the stove was a mixed success, but I shall persevere.
I have a slow cooker, but it's a large one, bought for cooking family meals, so I'm not sure if it'll do a good job making a single portion. It's something to experiment with though.
Thanks for this, it was an interesting subject.
Comment #2 posted on 2016-03-03 19:51:44 by Jon Kulp
Slow-Cooker Size
Our slow cooker's also pretty big, I wouldn't want to use it to make just one serving, which is why it was critical that my wife wanted to eat this stuff too. If you're making an enough for two people, then the slow cooker is just barely not too big. You could make enough for two or three people and then reheat the next day but it's not quite as tasty that way.
Comment #3 posted on 2016-03-03 22:28:32 by Dave Morriss
The way of the oat
Strategies for me seem to be: try to perfect the stove-top method, get a smaller slow cooker, or something else.
Actually, my daughter has a small slow cooker. If she's not using it I might grab it for oaty duties during the mid-term break.
My son visited today and I was chatting with him about this subject. He found a recipe for steel-cut oats using a pressure cooker, which I have and use a lot. I might try that idea at some point.
I'm not too enthusiastic about the reheating approach, I have to admit :-)
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