I was wrong. Recently I was introduced to the oat groat, the natural oat kernel. Oatmeal made from these groats, better known as steel-cut oats, is thick and creamy, a delicious breakfast.
But you won't find many groats out there on the shelves these days. It seems that almost all of them are destined to become rolled oats. According to Oat Science & Technology, published by the American Association of Cereal Chemists, rolled oats are created by steaming the groat until it softens enough to be rolled with a minimum of breaking.
Of course, all of that can only be accomplished after the hull - that's the hard shell - is removed. It turns out that quick-cooking oats are made in the same way, only thinner.
McCann's Irish Oatmeal and Arrowhead Mills are both popular brands. You'll pay a premium for these steel-cut oats, around $2.69 for 16 ounces.
Nutritionally, oats are exciting, but not nearly as much so as in the late 1980s when studies linked oat bran to lowered cholesterol levels. By the end of 1989, Quaker Oats hot oat-bran cereal was selling 20 million pounds, up
from 1 million pounds in 1987. That ain't hay.
And the oat-bran craze made medical writer Robert E. Kowalski's career. His book, The 8-Week Cholesterol Cure, was, for a time, the best-selling nonfiction book of all time, racking in $40 million in sales.
But, as later research confirmed, it is the soluble fiber in oat bran that can help to lower cholesterol levels in some people. The fiber binds with the digestive fluid bile, which contains large amounts of cholesterol and moves it out of the body.
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