Overnight Steel Cut Oats Recipe – Apple and Chia
This recipe for overnight steel cut oats contains apple and dates for sweetness whilst complemented with cinnamon and nutmeg for a great and delicious start to your day. By adding chia seeds, the water ratio differs from standard steel cut oat recipes but gives great health benefits to this breakfast.
If you are looking to create your own steel cut oat recipes the ratio is 6 parts water to 1 part steel cut oats. In other words, for plain steel cut oats porridge, for every 1/3 cup steel cut oats add 2 cups of water. Then you can add any spices, fruit, nuts, dried fruits etc to give it a bit of variation.
We started making overnight steel cut oats because a friend of ours mentioned it is what they do in their household everyday for breakfast and swore by it because of how much time it saved them in the morning. Any parent will tell you, any time that can be spared in the morning before kindy/school drop offs is very much appreciated. During our quest to find a good overnight oats recipe, the only ones we could get to work and our family enjoyed eating involved using steel cut oats. The apple and chia seeds overnight steel cut oats recipe below is the result of a fair few trial and error exercises before we found a recipe that worked perfectly and produced a tasty pot of porridge.
Overnight slow cooker oats works really well for the dynamics of our family. Some days my partner has to get up at 5am in the morning. This is well before anyone else in the household is even stirring. He gets up and has his share of the overnight oats leaving the rest in the slow cooker on the keep warm function. Then I get up 1-2 hours later and the slow cooker oats are still warm for me and the rest of the boys to enjoy and devour.
As we have the same breakfast every morning, we now prepare the ingredients into jars. Basically, we measure and put all the ingredients except the water and apple into a glass jar. We do this on a sunday, make around 7-8 jars to make sure we enough for the week so that all we have to do each night is pour the contents of a jar into the slow cooker, add two chopped apples and 3.5 cups of water, turn the slow cooker on and go to bed. This also makes it super easy if we go away on holiday and want to keep having our regular breakfast. We just take our slow cooker with us, enough prepared jars of slow cooker overnight oats ingredients to match the number of nights we are away.
Of course, if you are interested in a process video (ASMR) on how we make this overnight apple and chia steel cut oats recipe, click on the link below:
Steel Cut Oats Versus Old Fashioned Oats
Steel cut oats can be cooked on the stove top just like old fashioned rolled oats; however, it does take much longer to absorb the liquid and become a porridge. Comparably we are talking 40 minutes versus 10 minutes. Steel cut oats are the oat of the plant literally cut or sliced then packaged away for consumers. Whereas rolled oats or old fashioned oats are steamed and rolled; a process which makes them much quicker to cook at the expense of texture, flavour, low glycemic index and fibre. That is correct, steel cut oat benefits include: having a great nutty flavour, a chewy texture, more fibre and low glycemic index when compared to old fashioned oats because that is lost in the rolled oats production process. Just if you were wondering, rolle doats and old fashioned oats are just different names for the same type of oats.
How to cook steel cut oats is really simple, even more so if you have a slow cooker. The bonus of making slow cooker oatmeal is that it can be done overnight so you wake up to the delicious scent and warmth of freshly made steel cut oats for breakfast.
Overnight Steel Cut Oats - Apple and Chia
Serves 4
1/2 cup plus 2 tbsp steel cut oats
1 tbsp chia seeds
1 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp ground nutmeg
6 pitted dates, chopped
2 medium apples, chopped
3 1/2 cups water
Place all ingredients into a slow cooker.
Slow cook on low setting for at least 6 hours or overnight.
Serve in bowls as is or topped with fresh fruit and/or frozen berries.
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