| | If you want an alternative method of cooking rice (or anything else) that is quicker than a rice cooker, get yourself a pressure cooker, but not just any pressure cooker -- the Duromatic made by Kuhn Rikon, a Swiss company, which cooks brown rice in 20 minutes (actually about 28, allowing for the pressure to rise and fall) and just about anything else. Many pressure cookers don't accommodate things like rice and barley, because these grains get stuck in the vent and cause the pressure to build up and the pressure cooker to explode. The Duromatic has a safety release valve in case anything gets stuck, which rarely happens.
I cook everything in this baby, including steel-cut oats, which normally take a good half hour or more of careful cooking in a saucepan, but taste a whole lot better than the rolled oats. When I cook the steel-cut in the Duromatic, however, it only takes 10 to 15 minutes to get them really well cooked. Delicious! Steel-cut oats are simply the oat groats cut in half to speed cooking time. Nowadays, people are so accustomed to the rolled oats, they wouldn't recognize an oat groat if they saw one. Oat groats look like large kernals of rice. Steel-cut oats taste so good, you won't want to put anything on them. Just eat them plain for their incredible nutty flavor. They're nothing like rolled oats, which are a pale reflection of the steel cut and do need flavor enhancers like milk, sugar and fruit. The reason that the rolled oats lack the flavor of the steel-cut is probably the extra processing they undergo in the process of being rolled. If people only knew the difference in flavor, I'll bet there'd be a far greater demand for the steel-cut, which are now available only in health-food stores as Irish or Scottish oat meal.
If you really like these oats, and want to eat them regularly, you can order them in bulk from a health-food store. I get a 25-lb. bag for about 50 cents a pound. I also have a rice cooker, but haven't tried cooking the steel-cut oats in that, although I suspect it would take a bit longer. You could also try cooking them a crock-pot. Put them on at night and have them ready in the morning.
As for rice, who here has tried Jasmine and Basmatti brown? Great taste! Also, there's wild rice, which you have to cook a bit more, but again, the flavor is the payoff. I'm amazed that people in our society settle for such bland, tasteless fair as white rice, white bread, rolled oats, etc. They don't know what they're missing from the less processed variety.
- Bill
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