Rolled, Steel Cut or Quick Cooking?  What’s the difference anyways?

 

Adagio Acres is excited to now be offering three different ‘styles’ of oats.

Our traditional large-flake rolled oats are great for porridge, baking, and granolas, and offer a texture that is versatile for a huge variety of recipes.  These rolled oats are produced by flattening the oat groat between two large rollers, which exposes the inside of the oat groat and allows them to cook and soften quickly.

Steel Cut Oats have the same nutritional value and benefits, but are produced by cutting the oat groat into two or three pieces with steel blades rather then flattening them with rollers.  The result is an oat with a unique texture that makes a wonderful slow cooking porridge, smooth and creamy while still retaining some of the original ‘crunch’ of a minimally processed oat.

Our Quick Cooking Oats are milled by first chopping our oats into small pieces (steel cut) and then rolling them as thin as possible to expose more surface area, which allows them to cook quicker and bind together easier when baking.  Unlike ‘instant’ or conventionally milled quick oats, these oats are not steam processed, and the nutritional value is not altered in any way.  We like to use Quick Cooking Oats in muffins, breads, cookies, pancakes and squares, or to replace up to 1/3 of the wheat flour in any recipe that needs a flavour and nutrition boost!

 

Oat Rice?!?

And here’s where we throw things for a loop. Because our “naked” oats loose their hulls without abrasive dehulling, we are able to keep them in their whole form. They look a bit like a grain of rice. Actually, they cook and taste a bit like a grain of rice too! So we’ve blended them together with our other-favourite-rice-imposter (Wild Rice, grown in NW Ontario) and the end result is an oat that acts like rice, and works beautifully in stews and soups, casseroles and risottos, side-dishes and salads. Our kids are groaning already, because if oatmeal for breakfast 6 days a week isn’t enough, now they have oats for supper too! But we’re pretty happy with it, because rice can be a convenient filler, but it comes up lacking on the nutrition side of the coin.

Oat-Rice Risotto with wild morels