As the World Porridge Making Champion is crowned, lovefood explores the fascinating world of breakfast oats.
Making porridge is a serious business. For the 20th Annual Golden Spurtle Championships in the Scottish Highlands, contestants agonised over every detail. Hard or soft water? Sea or table salt? Medium or pinhead oatmeal? Student John Boa chose medium oatmeal and was crowned overall champion, while Nick Barnard, MD of Rude Health, won Best Speciality Porridge.
Big business
In five years, the value of the hot cereals market has virtually doubled to £241 million and nearly half of us eat them. You can buy oatmeal (pinhead/coarse), jumbo oats, rolled oats (aka porridge oats) or instant oats, and all contain soluble fibre. The main difference is how much they’ve been processed: from the least (pinhead) to the most (instant). Confusingly, if you trawl the internet for recipes, our US cousins use the word oatmeal for both the raw oats and the cooked product.
The real McCoy
Pinhead oatmeal is oat groats that are cut by steel or stone. You can find it at independent health food stores and some supermarkets from £2.39/kilo. I oven-baked half a cup of White’s Irish oatmeal with two cups of semi-skimmed milk for 70 minutes at 170C in a fan oven. It did stick though so maybe use a non-stick pan. Another method involved boiling for one minute, leaving it covered overnight, then simmering again for ten minutes the next day. Both methods worked like a dream. The day after, I microwaved the leftovers with milk. ‘I add leftover oatmeal to smoothies,’ Rude Health’s marketing manager Camilla Barnard told me. Verdict: big success.
Rolled and jumbo oats
‘Rolled oats make claggy porridge,’ opines lovefood editor Andrew Webb, and many agree. However, your kids may enjoy a smoother texture. If so, buy loose rolled oats from about 79p/kilo because Ready Brek
– rolled oats plus oat flour – is SIX times as expensive. Jumbo oats have better texture, but with both you can experiment with different liquids, contents and toppings. Try apple porridge (grated apple, apple juice, mixed spice), Caribbean porridge (coconut milk, allspice, banana) or chocolate porridge using flavoured oat milk or almond milk.
Instant, microwaved oats
While portable and convenient, these aren’t for the budget-conscious. At £1.99 for 189g, Special K’s Multi-Grain Porridge works out at around £10/kilo compared with 79p for Co-op Simply Value rolled oats above. What about taste and texture? You don’t have to buy sugary, flavoured varieties. Most instant porridge makers offer an ‘Original’ version where the only extra is the emulsifier, soya lecithin. They seem to be trying hard to counter criticism that they’re gloopy and over-sweet. Both White's and Dorset Cereals have versions containing jumbo oats.
For this article, I tasted Tesco Finest Scottish Oat sachets with cranberries, raspberries and pumpkin seeds (£1.99/344g). While I disliked the rather synthetic smell and flavour, the texture – helped by dried fruit and the occasional seed – was much better than expected.
How do you like your oats? Got any good recipes? Talk to us in the Comments box below.
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