Finally tried this thing I'd heard you could do...

...Cooking steel-cut oats in the rice cooker, plugged into a timer, so it would come on and start cooking an hour before I planned to get up.

Verdict:  5 servings of perfectly cooked oats, 1 serving of perfectly-gunked-up rice cooker. The oats foamed up and plugged the vent.  I think I can clean it out, but I won't be sure until the next time I cook rice.

  My rice cooker is a sturdy, restaurant-quality one that wasn't cheap, and its fancy gasketed lid is going to have to come apart to be cleaned now; perhaps, if I want to make a habit of this (and I do -- the oatmeal was fantastic, much better than when I tried to make it overnight in the crock-pot) I should get a cheap rice cooker with a simple lid, and dedicate it to steel cut oats.

Mmm, steel cut oats.  Normally we make oatmeal from rolled oats in the microwave.  I don't eat them much.  And then while we were at Camp du Nord last month, they served steel cut oats and ... yum.  I had forgotten how good they are.  And now that I am no longer eating low carb, well, they can return to my diet in quantity!  Yay!  The only barrier:  I am the one who wants them, I am the one who gets up first, and I am a "get up and eat breakfast right away" person, not a "get up and wait an hour for the oats to cook" person.  By the time steel cut oats are done, I would already have given up and had bacon and eggs.  Hence the cook-while-you-sleep experiments.

Comments

[CJ]

Maybe a pat of butter (or coconut oil, in your house) along with the oats? That's what I do to prevent foaming/clogging in my pressure cooker, just add a smidge of fat.

I love steel-cut oats but my boys do not. One of them says the texture reminds him of bursting pustules. Mmm, pustules for breakfast. If the cooking times weren't so different, I'd fade in steel-cut oats a little at a time in our regular oatmeal, but... you know what? Just this minute it dawned on me -- I don't think anything bad happens to rolled oats that get cooked for longer than usual. Maybe I'll try that: a little steel-cut, a bunch of the usual, and gradually shift the proportions. Excuse me while I think aloud in your comments. :-)