Some of my best recipes come from figuring out what to do with food that I don’t want to go to waste. I recently purchased some organic apple juice for a recipe from Dr. John McDougall’s book The Starch Solution so I had most of the bottle minus 2/3 cup hanging around.
I love eating oat groats for breakfasts on days that I don’t eat banana nice cream. Oat groats are the hearty oat grains before they are steel-cut or rolled. They are cut and rolled to reduce surface area in order to lessen cooking time. With my Instant Pot, I rarely am concerned with long cooking times any more.
Groats on the left. Rolled oats on the right:
If I know that I’m going to be active with massage work or exercise, I’ll eat simple carbohydrates of fruit for instant fuel. On other mornings, like today, when I’m going to be doing mostly desk work and don’t need so much fast-burning fuel, I’ll eat complex carbohydrates like grains for a slower release of fuel. So today oat groats were on the menu and I had the bright idea to pressure cook them in apple juice instead of water.
I loaded up 1 cup of oat groats and 1 and 2/3 cups apple juice into the Instant Pot and set it to pressure cook for 30 minutes.
When it was ready, I spooned the appled groats into my bowl. The groats were more runny than they normally are when I cook them with water, so next time I may cut back the juice to 1 and 1/2 or 1 and 1/3 cups. Next I cut one banana on top and then generously sprinkled the dish with cinnamon.
According to Dr. Michael Greger in How Not to Die, adding just a half-teaspoon of cinnamon to your oatmeal, you can increase the antioxidant power from 20 units to 120 units!
I usually have Simply Organic brand cinnamon, however I’m trying to clean up and out my crazy spice drawer and so used an older non-organic McCormick cinnamon.
The groats were sweet, not surprisingly. When I cook my groats with water, I usually don’t add sweetener, though every now when I’m feeling rebellious I’ll drizzle some real maple syrup on top. I love the taste of hearty groats, so usually eat them unsweetened with just banana and cinnamon.
This was a great way to use up some nice apple juice which is something I don’t usually have on hand. I wouldn’t go out of my way to continue buying juice to make groats this way from here on out, but it’s nice to know that if I have some fruit juice that needs using up, pressure cooking groats in the juice is a wonderful solution!
Now, off to tackle that desk work!
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