Frozen Oatmeal

I have long maintained that the one of the big reasons to buy a name-brand product rather than its generic equivalent is more often because of the packaging than because of taste. Packaging done right is hard to do, and your run-of-the-mill grocery store chain will not follow through on this, so your resealable packages might not reseal, or your milk cartons might not open without severe structural damage, or it just may take a lot of work to open something generic where the name-brand is effortless. I, apparently, have not yet mastered the packaging. More on that later.

Frozen oatmeal. Tasty stuff, easy to make in the morning, relatively easy to prepare before hand. As opposed to instant oatmeal, frozen oatmeal is made from steel-cut oats, while instant is made of rolled oats. You may prefer one or the other, which is why you might want to go with one rather than the other. They both take a few minutes of microwaving in the morning, so aside from packaging, it's all about taste.

Trader Joe's has some frozen oatmeal:

And inside this box you get something that looks like:

A nice, multi-purpose block of oatmeal there. Can fit in many bowls, and microwaves relatively easily. But I wanted to be clever, and take advantage of the fact that you probably know what bowl you're going to microwave your oatmeal in.

Make your steel-cut oatmeal however you would normally make it, except cook it a little less than you would normally cook it. It's going to cook a bit more when you reheat it. Not too much less, just a tiny bit. A bit more crunch than normal. Let the oatmeal cool.

So what I figured is that, if you use the bowl to mould your oatmeal, you'll be set. So I covered the inside of the bowl with some plasic wrap, and poured the oatmeal in.

Then I wrapped the plastic wrap over the top

And froze everything.

And this is where I ran into problems. Ideally, what would happen next is that I would unmould the oats, unwrap them from the plastic wrap, and then put them in zip-top bags, awaiting microwaving. There were only two flaws in my otherwise perfect plan.

The first flaw is basic physics. Cooked oatmeal contains a bunch of water. When you freeze water, it expands and hardens. This makes removing it from a rigid container that it was perfectly suited to be in before being frozen, well, difficult. Or impossible, without breaking the bowl or letting the oatmeal thaw a bit.

Once you do get the oatmeal out, you have something that looks like:

If you go back through the photos of the plastic wrap, you will start to see flaw #2: when frozen, the oatmeal hardens around all of those little lines folds of oatmeal holding the plastic wrap in. So, while frozen, the plastic wrap cannot be unwrapped from the oatmeal without tearing a leaving little bits of plastic in the oatmeal. You do not want to microwave and eat plastic wrap, so clearly this is not the way to go.

There are certainly other ways to skin this particular cat. You can just freeze it in plastic containers, you can freeze it into ice cube trays and have an easily scaled recipe ("Do you want 5 cubes or 6?"), or you could just leave them in the bowls that you froze them in and skip the plastic wrap. I was hoping for something more.

If I get seriously into this next winter, then I will make a few silicone moulds of our bowls, then freeze them in that. The silicone can peel away from the frozen oats, and the smooth surface will keep it from getting it trapped in the oatmeal. For now, I will just have to suffer with a less-than-perfect setup. For now.

Comments

[Elizabeth]

How about using a silicon muffin sheet for molds?

[Brian]

Absolutely. I have only silicone Madeleine pans and cake pans, so those won't work as well. If you have the muffin pan, though, that'll be great.

[Alan]

How about just starting in the zip top bags and not worrying about the shape?

[Marilyn Southmayd]

Sounds like a really cool idea. I had never thought of that. Have to keep that in mind when we have left over oatmeal.