Ever wondered what’s the most complete and quick breakfast you can stir up in minutes and even bring on the go? The answer: Have yourself some overnight oats! This high fiber meal can easily hit the right spots when it comes to hunger and nutrition and it doesn’t need much experience or knowledge for you to succeed in making it!
A common problem with oatmeal is that the texture is usually a bit off or that its taste is highly reminiscent of paper. That’s something that’s not so hard to fix. Right off the bat, there are 3 kinds of oatmeal being sold in the market: the quick cook variant, the steel cut variant, and the rolled variant. Let’s look into it a bit deeper.
The steel-cut variant is made by having steel rollers cut through the oats, making them a bit mushier and slurp-able once cooked. The grains are made relatively smaller than the rolled variant, much like rice that has been a bit ground.
The rolled variant on the other hand only has the grains rolled to maintain its natural shape and form, giving a better chew and a rougher texture once you try to have it for your consumption pleasure. To add, it’s the one in the market that’s a bit more expensive when sold.
Lastly, there’s the quick cook or instant variant. These oats are pre-cooked, dried. Then, packaged for easier consumption for the people who buy it. Since it’s already been softened prior, the texture is highly reminiscent of the steel cut oats despite technically bearing the shape of rolled oats.
Oats easily comprise the fiber and carbohydrate department of a daily diet. Making overnight oats is very simple, you just have to leave your oats soaking in milk (1:1 ratio) overnight. Feel free to flavor it to your liking and add the appropriate toppings before serving. Technically speaking, it’s like making pizza. Your oats would be the dough and all the other toppings work in such a way that you can add anything on top just to make things less bland and boring. Moving further, here’s how you make things more balanced.
Your Source of Energy
Aside from the innate carbohydrates found in the oats themselves, you can add a bit of sweetness to the mixture by having some sugar, chocolate, or honey to flavor your oats accordingly.
PRO TIP: Add a dash of salt to make the flavor profile more interesting and that it doesn’t end up all strikingly sweet
Your muscle builders
You can instantly get this off of the milk, but of course, that simply wouldn’t suffice. Add some nuts to it to give it some crunch, a different texture, and a savory mouth feel to the meal. A lot of seeds and legumes work for this, such as peanuts, cashews, sunflower seeds, chia seeds, walnuts, and even almonds. Go crazy and experiment!
Your immunity builders and body regulators
You can easily outsource this by adding fruit to your oats. It’s up to you if you want to add them fresh or dried, but it would be best to opt for the former so you get a different mouthfeel and a more exciting flavor profile. If you don’t feel like chewing through dried fruit, add it to the oat and milk mixture when you steep the entire thing overnight. The best fruits for this are bananas, kiwi, dragon fruit, mango, peaches, or berries. You can go crazy and add one or three at a time, your imagination is the only limit here.
For the minerals, on the other hand, you are free to add spices to your liking. Add some cinnamon to give it an aromatic boost or opt for paprika and cayenne to give the meal a little kick. Circling back, if everything you have added is on the sweeter side of things, a bit of salt would help.
Other Substitutes
Much like when pizza is always attributed as something savory, overnight oats tend to be imagined as something always sweet. But that case can easily be debunked; as dessert pizzas do exist, and so do savory overnight oat bowls. You can easily swap out the milk for pork, beef, chicken, or vegetable broth if you want to. For the toppings, grab the proteins from actual slices of flavored meat like cold cuts, meat stews or, deep-fried meats. For your vitamins, you are free to add vegetables to your liking, too. Just blanch them a while, roast them, or even add them in right after cutting. Spices would easily contribute to the mineral component, as you can easily use everything you have in your kitchens such as oregano, basil, or even star anise.
The trick to coming up with the perfect overnight oats bowl is for you to consider it as your carb base. From there, adding components and flavoring accordingly would come as a bit of a breeze. Feel free to experiment with different flavor combinations until you get some favorites that you would want to come back into from time to time.
Truth be told, the real key in putting out the best overnight oats would be reliant on getting yourself a trusty refrigerator. In the Philippines, a trusted brand for that kind of work is Condura, as it’s known locally for its long-lasting functionality that comes at a very affordable price for every Filipino family to enjoy. It comes in different shapes and forms: some benefit from having side by side doors, some offer no frost functionality, and some offer inverters installed in it for more convenient refrigerator compartmentalization.
