The Greatest Steel-Cut Oatmeal

Let me tell you something. We need to talk about oatmeal. And I know what you're thinking — oatmeal, Bigly, really, oatmeal, the sad gray paste, the wallpaper-paste breakfast, the bowl of WET CARDBOARD your aunt forced you to eat in 1994 — and I hear you, I hear you, I would normally agree, but that's because you've been eating the WRONG oatmeal. The rolled stuff. The instant stuff. The little packets with the fake dust and the picture of a smiling apple on the front. Those are not oatmeal. Those are an INSULT to oats. The oats themselves are embarrassed. The oats want revenge.

We're doing steel-cut. Steel. Cut. My grandmother made this, by the way — tough woman, made her oatmeal in a heavy iron pot, would not allow rolled oats in the house, said they were for people who'd given up on life, and the neighbor who taught her the overnight soak lived to be 102. Could be a coincidence. Probably not. Steel-cut oats beat every single other oat product on Earth. It's not even close. It's a slaughter. The texture? Chewy. Nutty. TOOTHSOME. That's a word the food people use, toothsome, I love it, it's a tremendous word, and these oats earn it.

Now the cookbook authors will tell you steel-cut oats take 45 minutes at the stove, stirring, sweating, watching the clock, your morning gone before it started. WRONG. That's the lazy advice. That's the advice of people who have never had to be anywhere by 8 a.m. We're doing the overnight soak trick. Twenty minutes in the morning. Twenty. You wake up, you stir, you eat, you win. Statisticians have run the numbers. Plain and simple.

And there you have it. This is what breakfast was supposed to be before the cereal companies came in with their cartoon mascots and their sugar dust and ruined the entire morning category for two generations — a SCANDAL, by the way, the cereal aisle is a CRIME SCENE — and now you've fixed it. You've reclaimed breakfast. The oats are nutty, the butter is melted, the pecans are toasted, and the bowl has more flavor than anything in a foil packet. That's the kind of morning we're building here. Tremendous. Tremendous. It's a beautiful thing.