If you’ve only ever had the popular oats (instant oatmeal, quick oats, and rolled oats,) you are probably asking, “what are steel cut oats?”
Well, all types of oats you find in the store start out the same. Steel cut oats start out as the same oat kernel that rolled oats come from, but they are prepared differently.
If you don’t want to watch over the stove, you could try something a little different. Some people are reporting success when they cook their steel cut oats in a crock pot or slow cooker. (I think these devices are effectively the same thing.)
The appeal of this technique is that you can cook steel cut oats in a slow cooker on low overnight, and the oats will be ready to eat for breakfast!
If you can’t be bothered to do real cooking on a stove top, there is a way to cook steel cut oats in the microwave.
It does make sense. Maybe you don’t want to mess with the stove just to make a bowl of oatmeal for yourself – so use the microwave instead.
The traditional way to cook steel cut oats is on the stove top. This is your standard method of preparing steel cut oats, and while being the most time consuming, it is the most reliable.
Continue reading for instructions on how to cook steel cut oats on the stove.
The biggest problem many people face is buying steel cut oats instead of rolled oats. Relatively speaking, steel cut oats are hard to find and expensive. Not everyone has heard of them yet.
Fortunately, every day it gets easier to find good steel cut oats, and if you know where to find the best deals, you can actually save money by buying steel cut oats.
The idea of “overnight oats” comes from the world of rolled oats. All you had to do to prepare breakfast was soak some rolled oats overnight in water, milk, and/or yogurt. The oats soak up the liquid overnight, and by morning, your oats were “cooked” and ready to eat.
If you are planning to do “overnight steel cut oats,” the process is a little different. It is just a variation on the regular steel cut oats on the stove process.
When most people hear about steel cut oats, they start to wonder, “are steel cut oats better than rolled oats?”
What I have noticed is that virtually everyone who knows about steel cut oats will say how much better they are than rolled oats. But let’s see if there is any truth to that as I compared steel cut oats and rolled oats…
There are two things I love about this time of year, aside from watching the leaves change – pumpkin pie and pumpkin ice cream. Alas, my doctor told me that those pumpkin foods should not form the basis of my diet!
So I decided to combine my love of pumpkin with my normal breakfast of steel cut oats. These are just simple pumpkin steel cut oats.
My third test batch was the best of the bunch, and although I rarely keep detailed recipes, here are my mental notes of how it went: