With time in the kitchen at a premium for many of us, quick or “instant” oats are a favorite to reduce cooking time for a fast and nutritious bowl of breakfast porridge. Despite this convenience, it is best to avoid commercial quick oats. They are “instant” for a rather unappetizing reason.
Food manufacturers pre-cook, dry, and cut oat groats slightly thinner when making quick oats vs regular rolled oats.
This means they go stale more quickly. In addition, the delicate polyunsaturated fats in the oats (15% of the total calories) go rancid faster when the protective, fibrous material of the oats are processed more heavily and into smaller pieces.
Thus, store bought instant oats are not as nutritious and can potentially introduce toxicity to your system when you eat them.
When it comes to rolled oats, however, you can definitely enjoy the benefits of quick cooking without the downside of all that processing!
All you have to do is pulse a cup of rolled oats in a food processor before you put the pot on the stove to cook.Ā I like to use sprouted oats because then I don’t need to soak them overnight.
Alternatively, you can use homemade quick oats to make a pot of soaked overnight porridge as well.
Note that this method also works to make quick cooking Scottish style or Irish steel cut oats, but only if you have a fairly heavy duty food processor.
Try this easy DIY instant oats recipe below and see what you think!
Homemade Instant Oats
One minute recipe for making your own quick oats for a healthier and fresher tasting bowl of oatmeal.
Ingredients
- 1 cup rolled oats
Instructions
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Pour rolled oats into a small food processor.
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Close lid and pulse until the rolled oats are the consistency of finer cut instant oats.
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Soak or cook as usual.
Recipe Video
Recipe Notes
Use sprouted rolled oats or steel cut oats if you prefer!
This isn’t about oats really, but about cereal in general. I will be 73 this month. I have been following your blog for several years. Yours and Kelly the Kitchen Kop. I know that you think that store bought cold cereal is not healthy and I have actually tried to make my own. It was awful. Sometimes I just want a bowl of cereal. I don’t think it will kill me to eat an occasional bowl. Do you have any suggestions as to what might be better than most?
Thank you,
Jane Metzger
Hi Jane, I would concur that boxed cereal is one of the hardest processed foods to give up. I stopped eating it 20 years ago give or take and I still miss it! That said, I don’t really have a single brand I could recommend as an occasional treat. If there was one, I would be probably be eating it now and then! There is a sprouted cold cereal brand that I wish would remove all the sugar … then I might eat it once in awhile.