1. Do
2. Learn
3. Create
It’s a process, a hierarchy, or just a scheme. I haven’t decided which.
I got a bit of all three done today, though all three were in a way interconnected and linked through the kitchen.
In the process of working with half a pound of rolled oats — boiling in a 2.5-to-1 ratio of water, oats in a mesh bag to keep them separate from the liquid and easier to deal with — I was reminded of how gummy oats are … can be.
And I wondered: would or could oats then be a really good base for a type of pudding or custard?
As it is I’ve already used steel cut oats in the past as a replacement for rice in rice pudding, but there the oats have just been cooked in enough water as to make them tender and a good replacement for rice. The pudding-ness comes from the dairy (and, usually, egg(s)) as well as the added sugar. But that’s not the same as using oats, rolled oats in particular, as a thickening agent.
They release enough starch, it seems, that if you (a) first cooked the oats in enough water to make a viscous liquid and then (b) kept the oats separated so you could grind them separately or such afterward, then you could (c) probably use the whole mess as an interesting base for an ice cream type dessert. Or with eggs a kind of non-dairy custard.
At the moment these are just thoughts and I need to do more ‘research’ — both in terms of finding out what others have done as well as in trial-and-error cooking — to figure things out. It seems like such an obvious thing to do — using the starch in oats as a thickener in custardy desserts — that surely someone else has done or reported on it. I’ve just not searched very hard yet.
Related to that is that I really ought get around to making oat milk.
“Milk” is such a weird word here, but there you have it. Or take “soy cream” and “rice cream” … there’s no “cream” in either; it’s just another case of divorcing a term from its origins and broadening it. Some people don’t care for this … they may not like nouning verbs or verbing nouns, either, but neither is a new development, and English has been doing both for centuries, but I digress … but it’s just part of the evolution of language.
Anyway: oat milk.
Years ago in Madison I shopped with a friend at one of the local-ish stores and found these neat, inexpensive cartons of oat milk, and at the time I was trying out various beverages and the like. And I did love the couple quart cartons I had over the course of that month, but the grocery store stopped carrying them soon after. At Whole Foods last month I came across a different brand of oat milk, but it was two three times as expensive as the neighboring rice, coconut, and soy milk products.
Rolled oats, though, are inexpensive … and homemade oat milk is basically water + oats + time.
That’s for the future; now it’s late and I need my sleep.
Appendix: Oats
- Homemade Oat Milk
- Vanilla Oat Custard
- Oat Starch vs. Quick Cooking Oats
- Oat Starch Powder Recipes
- How to cook oatmeal pudding?
- Kaerakile (Fermented Oat Flummery) Recipe from Estonia
- Starch: Chemistry and Technology, James N. BeMiller & Roy Lester Whistler, p. 591
- Oat’s Heart-Friendly Beta Glucans Mimic Fat
- Oatmeal Ice Cream: Best. Homemade. Vegan. Ice cream. EVER
